It might feel wrong to call their last proper sit down at a couch/desk singeplayer experience a “classic”, but its older than Half-Life one was when it came out.
That makes me feel old and I wasn’t even around for HL1. How’s your back feeling, millennials?
We’re at that age where you have to exercise and watch what you eat if you want to be in good health (and not have your back hurt.) The friends I grew up with who haven’t touched a vegetable in their life, no longer happen to look healthy and thin.
I’ve been biking so much lately that my legs are getting hella toned, the rest of my body is starting to tone too and I’m feeling much more alive and healthy than I have at any other point in my life!
This is my second season. I’m biking about 5 hours a week right now, averaging about 40-50 miles per week. I don’t know how obvious the toning would be to others but I can certainly see it, since y’know I’m the one who sees myself the most
And I’d say that it is 100% deserved. Stardew Valley is a once in a lifetime kind of game and has one of the best developers you could ask for. Free new content and updates for 10 years and it’s still like $20 and frequently on sale. The developer actually tweeted out once that if he ever charged for new content that he’d want everyone to publicly shame him.
“I swear on the honor of my family name, i will never charge money for a DLC or update for as long as I live. Screencap this and shame me if I ever violate this oath.”
Stardew Valley is the gaming industry at its best and one of the best indie games out there.
Hehe yeah. To celebrate the recent patch increasing multiplayer to 8 people. We basically started like a DnD group sessions style of playthrough. We would meet weekly and play for like 8 hours at a time. Was pretty great.
But at the same time there are plenty of indie devs that sell games for $30 and then have a few $15 DLC on top of that after a few years. Not throwing shade at those other devs, more just saying that the dev for Stardew Valley could have sold DLC and nobody would have questioned it but chose not to. You could be like Stardew Valley and keep the game cheap, free updates, and frequent sales or you could be like Factorio and refuse to ever put your game on sale and up the price every couple of years and come out with a $20 DLC. And I’d be shocked if Stardew Valley has made less money than Factorio in the long run, especially with it being the in number one place right now.
And yet those small studios are one flop away from bankruptcy. Stardew Valley is a one in a million success story and should not pose as a benchmark. Barone decided to continue as a more or less single dev, but you can‘t blame talented young designers to expand their team to realize more ambitious projects and sacrifice economic safety for that simply because they now employ people. Barone can do updates ten years later and postpone Haunted Chocolatier for that, you can‘t do that if multiple people depend on their salary.
I think it’s fair, and sometimes good. I’ve been playing Stationeers recently and it’s fantastic. It’s priced reasonably, and it’s an amazing game. They have a few DLCs, which are purely there to give support, not new content. It’s for you to pay the devs more if you have the money to give them and want to.
However, they’re also losing money on the game and have said they never expect it to be profitable*. Most games aren’t Stardew Valley, and they’re struggling to survive. Stardew doesn’t need to make more money. Most small/indie studios do.
*It’s the studio making Kitten Space Agency, which they’ve said they want to be free, with the option to donate. I think they’re allergic to making profit and only like making cool games. I’d highly recommend checking out their games, if only because they seem to be doing development for the sake of the games.
Idk Stardew Valley is a passion project if I’ve ever seen one. Sure, concernedape is making extraordinary profits, but it has to feel way better to have a decent size of the planet’s population playing and connecting with the project they poured their heart and soul into.
I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.
I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.
Mate, it’s one man, Self-published, pulling in the proceeds of a game that has sold 41 million copies. Even if he has made $5 per copy, that’s over $200 million dollars. The profit margin on his time even after 10 years is insane.
I didn’t realize it had sold quite that many. I knew he spent a lot of time working on it, like 70 hours per week for 4.5 years, but that still works out to at least an enormous $12,000 an hour! Even if he kept at 70 hours/week for all ten years, it’s still only half that number, far greater than you or I will likely ever see.
Steamcharts showed about 150,000 concurrent players playing the game when I saw a few days ago; I’m shocked at just how popular it is as well. I think he could basically just work on it 70 hours a week for the rest of his life and it would still be a great hourly rate.
My only issue has always been that I cannot throw more money at the ape. So I buy the game for gaming-adjacent friends and almost always ruin their lives convert them
That’s what I do too. I’ve bought it for all my friends or have convinced them to get it. Feels like I’m a drug dealer trying to push it on everyone I know lol.
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve re-purchased the game for Switch and iOS after already having it on my PC for ages. I didn’t really want to play it on those platforms but just wanted to give more money to concerned ape.
The copy of Minecraft I bought back then no longer works (there was a bunch of buggy account change stuff that never worked for me). My copy of stardew valley still just works.
It’s bad and it’s kids. Like, the game is no better if you doin’t aim it at kids, but the fact they intentionally employ child labor as a gamified device is just disgusting.
It’s a game designed for kids with not enough moderation/limitations for a kids game. There’s literal porn games if you look in the right places (called ‘condo games’)
Yeah, the other problem with these kinds of open-ended social games that are heavily aimed at children is that adults who want to exploit children will play those games for that express purpose.
Same issue with games like VRChat, and to a less extent, Fortnite.
And I could say at least Kamala doesn’t have all her political opponents locked up. I wouldn’t do that though because boiling a politician down to a single issue doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe not to you, but when 15,000 children have been murdered and an entire population is starving, then boiling a politician down to a single issue does make sense to me.
I’m not apathetic, I’ve actively contacted my representatives demanding a cease fire. I’ve donated for aid for Gaza. Considering what Erdogan has done to the Kurds I find you argument extra rich. By all means continue to act all self righteous when I will be the one who has to deal with the other guy if you keep carrying water for his campaign.
Would you have an idea about what they would care about? Like are they just virtue signaling hard? Why not?
Like I could see Russians or Chinese or Republicans pushing this point just to sow division on the Israel point. But why “tankies”? Maybe I should just google it
people claiming to care about Palestinians but then encouraging votes against them. Voting any way but for Harris will harm them and that’s easy to reason through but they don’t care. Ergo they do not give an actual flying fuck about any Palestinian, they just want to be seen as doing so.
You can do the right thing for the wrong reasons and this is a classic case. He’s an ethno-nationalist. Ask him how he feels about Kurdish minorities or the genocide of Armenians.
Everyone's malding over spoilers and not realizing this isn't an actual ending that's coded into the game, it's just a funny side effect of a spell that malfunctioned during the end boss.
People can also apply the slightest semblance of critical thinking and realize most gaming journalism outfits, no matter their questionable quality, will realize they won't last long if there are true spoilers in the titles. Therefore this isn't really a spoiler.
Like they're obviously going to phrase things in ways that get more engagement, which is why it's a crucial skill on the internet today that readers need to think critically and not just accept headlines literally.
I'm not saying it's right, but jfc man, you have to develop skills to engage with the internet you have, not the internet you wish you had. I really feel no sympathy for people who thought this was a spoiler. At least this is a cheap lesson in gullibility instead of a costly one.
If I understand, the argument is that someone who doesn't want to be spoiled for endings should...look at a headline purported to be specifically about endings, and then read the article to see if it's about endings, which they are not going to do because there is an extraordinarily high chance it's exactly what it says it is in big letters, and any failure to voluntarily read spoilers they don't want to be spoiled for is then a failure on the part of the player?
That feels like reaching. Would rather not be mean. I think people stranded on top of zombie infested buildings whose only method of escape is a single in-use helicopter have reached less.
This is just a justification to brush off anyone who opens their mouth at all, because were there a reader who did for some reason want to click on every headline they didn't want to know about in order to make sure they shouldn't have clicked on it, that would definitely still be something that is their fault once they saw anything they shouldn't.
Even leaving aside why someone would do that, the OP made the conscious decision to post it like they did.
They could have tipped everyone off to the clickbait. They could have used a spoiler tag if they didn't bother reading it or wanted to play into the clickbait. They chose to do neither. That has nothing to do with the journalistic integrity of online gaming mags. This was a personal mistake.
I have seen communities be shockingly good about respecting this. The Hades community especially is amazing and, though the game has been out now for so many years the sequel is nearing completion, they'd probably still just give you what bare advice they have to based on your current status and tell you to keep playing because "trust me."
I don't know why the bg3 community wants to pretend it's impossible and out of their hands, while swearing it shouldn't matter anyway. It very well is, and for a game this stunning, it absolutely does.
I think it was implied by “rarest” being in quotes.
edit: at least, I knew immediately it was no such thing because of that, like every other time someone says something while doing air quotes with their fingers.
It’s literally described in the very first sentence:
A Baldur’s Gate 3 player joked that their fiancée may have found the rarest possible ending for the game when Wild Magic turned everyone into dogs and cats for the final cutscenes.
Joycon drift, and all other thumbstick drift, is already a solved problem.
Use bushings that actually have some abrasive resistance and aren’t softer than a fingernail.
Use a non-contact based sensor to determine the XY position of the stick. Hall effect, optical, strain gauge, whatever, we’ve had the tech for 50 years.
The reason why they haven’t done this is one very simple reason: $$$
N64 does use optical sensors, the n64 stick is actually super precise and doesn’t suffer from drift. The n64 is a goofy controller but it is simply a great and accurate input device, and a lot of the games were really designed with that stick and notches in mind.
But it is made of all plastic and features plastic on plastic moving parts, without lubrication, so it suffers from wear of the plastic. Worn n64 sticks will actually be filled with plastic dust from the stick and gears literally sanding themselves down. The only problem with the controller is the premature wear of the stick.
It’s crazy to me that no company ever made a decent 3rd party N64 controller. The 3rd party ones were all as ridiculous as the defaults. Great console that I loved, but would have gotten a lot more out of with better controllers.
there was a hori n64 controller that looked like a normal double handle controller and it was really good, but it’s crazy expensive these days on ebay. I’ve also heard good things about the new brawl64.
The Hori Pad Mini? I had never seen that before, leagues above anything I remember being available at the time. The other looks amazing, definitely a modern controller that I would have killed for back then.
Yup. If they’d just made the bowl out of something OTHER than ABS, they would have been good. Delrin, PTFE, even a thin layer of brass or broze, and those controllers wouldn’t have had anywhere near the amount of issues they’re known for having.
There are third-party manufacturers who sell replacement bowls and sticks, made from everything from POM to steel.
the reason the n64 sticks suck is down to the stick tension construction and not really the sensing mechanism. Pretty much the thumbstick was pressed against a plastic bowl that wore away into white dust through use, making it floppy. it didn’t really have anything to do with the fact that it was an optical stick
The sensors on the N64 are basically the same kind you’d find in a mouse wheel. They work fine.
The crap part is the physical construction. There’s a lot of parts that wear down with use and cause the joystick to become loose due to the plastics wearing away.
Some people wouldn’t bother with a game at all if they knew there would be this.
Perhaps if this was unusual for the genre. But it's a AAA fighting game. Anybody who is familiar with the genre knows that MTX is normal and expected, because it's going to have several years of support from the developers. I'd have a hard time believing that any Tekken fan bought this on the premise of it remaining MTX-free.
Doesn't it, though? This is what the players wanted, and the industry listened. They asked for support for the game after its release, and the industry said "Sure, but in exchange at least some of you should pay extra".
This isn't forced upon anybody. Just because Mazaratis exist doesn't mean that you have to buy one if you want a car. It only becomes a moral problem if somebody's choices are circumvented, but that's not really what's happening here.
It used to normal to beat your kids. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.
This is what the players wanted, and the industry listened.
The reason we are having this conversation in the first place is because people didn’t want it.
This isn’t forced upon anybody.
They added it the game post-launch, after reviews had already come out. Anyone morally opposed to micro transactions (which as I’ll get to in next point, have a very good reason to be opposed to on principle) who had bought the game has been tricked into supporting a business practice they despise. This is incredibly scummy and should rightfully be seen as a dick move.
It only becomes a moral problem if somebody’s choices are circumvented, but that’s not really what’s happening here.
Micro transactions as a concept are strategically designed to exploit people with addictive personalities. This is not a theory on my part, this is legitimately what the intent behind them is. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a video discussing that very thing.
Exactly. If they’d announced this before launch, it would’ve been the only thing anyone talked about. There would have been a huge backlash and I’m sure a good percentage of the community would’ve dumped the series there and then.
If they’d announced this before launch, it would’ve been the only thing anyone talked about.
Not really. It'd hardly have been mentioned, at all. MTX are a part of every major fighting game, so it's hardly a newsworthy tidbit. They're completely expected in this genre. Any major competitive game that gets developer support after release is going to be funded either by microtransactions or subscriptions. The people who actually play these games know this.
If they place something behind MTs, then I completely agree. But, if they want to add more cosmetics that don’t exist yet, and they finance it MTs, and at a fair price, it’s less unethical.
If you tried the customisation, it feels extremely bare bones in comparison to Tekken 7. So I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff was removed to add to the Store.
Adding shit to a game with a patch, post purchase, doesn’t require you to partake. While I hate MTX as much as anyone, you aren’t required to buy anything. Sure, this is enshittification, but you can avoid that buy buying games that aren’t “always online”.
anyways for context for those not terminally online, Hasan is a leftist twitch streamer (who supports Ukraine*), he made a tweet advertising ac shadows.
some far right elon fan made a brain dead comment about it and elon took the opportunity to also dunk on hasan (because surely he has nothing else to do right?) calling him a “a sellout”, to which hasan replied:
this bitch literally paid someone to powerlevel his character in poe2 lmao. wym i’m a fraud? elon i challenge you to a duel in elden ring. i will cook your fat rolling ass.
which got some 30k likes.
now hasan reply was already a ratio enough but then assassin’s creeds official acc decided to completely destroy elon:
Is that what the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you?
its so bad that even asmongold isnt taking elons side on this one
elons isnt taking this well understandably. getting burned on a platform that he brought for 44b that gotta hurt lmao. like literally no one in the streamers/gaming space is taking his side. anyone that does immediately gets ratioed in the replies.
We should probably be thankful that that narcissistic manchild is so addicted to his social media. Imagine how much more destructive shit he could have accomplished if he actually put his mind to it.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Nintendo are cheap bastards, and if they fix the drift issue then they’ll likely cause it to fail prematurely somewhere else. Maybe the rubber will be cheaper so that it wears down and has to be replaced anyways? Or the plastic will be thinner so it cracks sooner, etc.
Also if they wanted to fix it for their next console, then they could have fixed it for this console. Hall effect isn’t some new technology, the dreamcast controller had it.
there was a class action lawsuit about this… all it resulted in was nintendo having to provide free repairs to joycons… that eventually will start drifting again
most people are focusing on the free labour roblox is extracting from kids but from the article:
Further claims stated, according to Turkish media, that Roblox hosted virtual parties promoting pedophilia and that “robux,” the platform’s virtual currency, was being distributed by bot accounts to encourage children’s involvement in these activities, and excess presence of gambling sites and their predatory tactics.
so it looks like roblox was banned because of bad moderation in regards to gambling and sexual predators, both of which are massive issues of the platform. overall i think this is a good move which hopefully will push roblox to do better.
And that’s why Stop Killing Games is getting big, and it’s also why every gaming company lobbied against it, making it even more important to sign.
If we’re gonna pay 80 dollars for a product, we better be fucking able to keep it. It literally makes no sense to allow this kind of shit for videogames but not for anything else. If a car company said “If we stop supplying parts to this old car, you must crush it” they’d be laughed out of the room.
It is the single most difficult thing as a parent to put my foot down about. Or it was at first.
My son LOVES watching the YouTubers playing the (horribly developed) games and enjoys making pretend games based on what he watches (some of it, sometimes we have to skip a video). He has a lot of friends at school that play it.
I will not let my son play it. Minecraft? Sure. Minecraft has a very different system, plenty of it crap, but it’s much easier to supervise and much less exploitive.
But he does let me know that he feels left out when his friends play it and he can’t. He doesn’t have any siblings, so I understand how it’s difficult to lack that connection to peers. He has other ways he gets to connect - mine craft, local playgyms, events for children, sports.
As a parent part of the empathy is feeling that sadness that comes from his disappointment in not being allowed to play it. But I think he has started to understand as he’s gotten a little older, that adults making money off of what a kid makes isn’t nice, or fair, or safe.
Turkey did well here. I don’t think we’ll ever have something similar in the states, but I hope regulation can come about eventually.
I straight up told my kid that he will not be playing that game. So you’re not alone out there and you’re doing well by taking an interest in your child’s activity and monitoring them appropriately. I wish more parents would do the same.
If he likes the idea of making games, just find a playlist of Godot or Unreal 5 game building on youtube. Most of that stuff can be done low-code, and would be perfect for someone who wants to click around and make something. It can be frustrating at first… but if you find something that actually works, I bet it’d click
I wish. There are things we have been unable to change, even with the assistance of a couple of child psychologists.
When he gets upset with other kids, particularly when they break rules, he is absolutely convinced he needs to be the executive of the rules and often hits or pushes the other kids.
He was doing it before my ex and I separated. It only seems to happen during the summer at the day care program, so it’s likely something more going on there.
Kids are still humans, and honestly I have to remind myself I’m doing the best I can. Because if I knew a better way to do things, I’d be doing that instead.
To me it’s not about raising a superstar, it’s raising someone who shares my values, and is capable of caring for themselves as an adult. Socializing and play is the most vital part of childhood development, so I do everything I can there.
Well put. I exaggerated, and not to minimize their issues, but the fact you clearly care and are willing to work at it makes me less worried for them.
All you can do is encourage good behavior/perspectives and discourage the bad. At some point, every child growing up will have to decide if they want to be like their parents or not. You’re clearly doing great, just keep going! And take care of yourself as well…
Yeah the same conversations have occurred in my household. I think you made the right choice here. I’m a huge gamer myself and developer, not on Roblox. Usually if anything it’s me being the lenient one when it comes to games in our home, vice my wife. This is one that I did not allow from day 1 regardless of the age of the kid. It was apparent to be a bad apple to me from my initial looks at it, and has only proven that point over the years. I can’t imagine though how hard it is for most parents who are not entrenched in that industry to navigate decisions like that.
If he likes making simple games, consider introducing him to Scratch. It’s not monetized at all and last I checked, was much better moderated than other online platforms for kids.
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