Well I can only speak for myself, but I prefer games stores in that order:
GOG, because DRM free and they don’t enforce game updates.
Steam, because they are well integrated into the SteamDeck, they push Linux gaming, and Gabe seems to be an alright guy.
Itch.io, because lots of indy games
Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.
There are business decisions with all of them that I dislike.
For the top dog PC game store, Valve could behave much much worse. Epic is still in the customer and game developer acquisition phase (and still behave like a d*ck with their exclusive deals), if the ever manage to push Valve aside, I believe they will be much worse.
For the top dog PC game store, Valve could behave much much worse.
But also much much better. They are really hands off with scummy dev practices, such as paid review farms. Sentinels of the Store covered them here. After it blew up, Steam removed some of the most obvious cases, but afaik others remain.
Valve can do a lot more, but what is more concerning to me is if they are actively consumer unfriendly. There is a difference between passively allowing bad stuff to happen, and actively doing bad stuff.
There is a difference between passively allowing bad stuff to happen, and actively doing bad stuff.
I don’t see that much difference. They are half-arsed about store and community moderation to such a degree that it feels like deliberate neglect. They chose the responsibility of running a platform, so need to do the job properly. If they need to hire more staff to do it, perhaps they could afford it from their billions of USD revenue.
Steam has also been hosting numerous outright neo-Nazi groups for many years (PDF) and never really stepped up effectively against them. User reports and media attention has limited effect.
As a general rule, steam discussion boards for a game are moderated by whoever the developer assigns that power to, and steam user groups are moderated by the group owner or whoever they delegate that power to and Steam doesn’t particularly care so long as you aren’t doxing, openly coordinating harassment, or doing something explicitly illegal in the US.
That’s also the general tilt they’ve taken with what’s allowed on the store since they opened the floodgates - if it’s not illegal and it’s not going to get them sued, it’s probably allowed if properly tagged. Which is why you can find Sex With Hitler side by side with Super Lesbian Animal RPG.
Worst they do is block it from specific regions if the local government requests it - see that game where you essentially play as Hamas fighting against the IDF that they recently blocked from the UK, the one where the largest part of the game description is arguing that the game isn’t antisemitic hate speech just because the enemy are Jewish. The call to block it came after a new patch that apparently added a scenario based on the Oct 7 attack.
Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.
Sums up how I feel about them. I have lots of games on my Epic account. I have paid for none of them, and refuse to change that. If it’s an Epic exclusive, it will eventually either release on other platforms, become an epic store free game of the week, or be an epic store freebie on amazon prime. I have enough games in my library I can wait.
I mostly take issue with the paid exclusivity deals from Epic. That kind of thing can stay on consoles. I also don’t trust Tim Sweeney or Tencent, and I feel that they’re kind of openly hostile to consumers.
I don’t care for intrusive DRM, but it’s clearly marked which games have it on Steam and which don’t. I won’t buy anything that requires a second account or has Denuvo. I don’t do online matchmaking games anymore, but if I did, I’d also avoid anything with kernel-level anti-cheat. I don’t really mind Steamworks DRM, though. It’s not intrusive and Steam is useful enough that I normally have it running in the background anyway.
I also like buying on Steam because they’re contributing so much to Linux gaming and FOSS, even if Steam itself isn’t FOSS. It’s because of them that I can have a Windows-free household without any significant compromises.
Long story short, there were two main issues that people had with Epic:
they made exclusivity a thing inside pc platform (this was the main issue for most people)
Tim Sweeney is generally disliked
The first issue speaks for itself. The second needs a bit more context.
Tim Sweeney has an history of being arbitrary. One year he says one thing, the next another. Relevant to this case, Tim was openly against PC gaming back in the day, while Valve was pushing for PC gaming. We’re talking around 2010, where console gaming was predominant, most publisher favored consoles against PC. Valve at the time was one of the few companies betting on the PC platform.
Now, he’s suddenly pro PC gaming. People see this as him doing a 180, and trying to take the spoils from Valve’s work.
Then there were also some comments that he made that aged like milk, but generally speaking this is why people take an issue with Epic but not Steam
Depends on the game developers, if they offer/upload a Linux/Mac version. On Linux, you have to either install/update your games manually, or use a third-party client. Idk about Mac. Third party clients can also integrate Wine for Windows games.
You don’t need to update them manually if you installed them using Heroic. You only need to update them manually if they were manually installed using a offline installer.
Which is what I said: “On Linux, you have to either install/update your games manually, or use a third-party client.” With third-party client I meant a client like Heroic.
Lutris is a game launcher for Linux that can install games from your GOG, Epic, and Steam accounts. I believe it even supports Proton which is a compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux (which is a Valve project that is based on Wine).
If a game works on Windows, there’s a 95% chance it works as good or better on Linux. The same can be said for MacOS apps, and Android apps, as there are packages to run those on Linux as well.
definitely more common now at least in my area. When I was a kid goodwill and value village were charging $40 for an old beat up snes or n64 and that was the whole clothes budget for me and my three siblings.
Friend ended up giving me a gamecube in middle school and that was my first console.
Yeah it’s always been a status symbol. Nowadays it isn’t even that useful because they put auction houses in the expansion cities anyway, so it’s basically just a status symbol for people who spend WAY too much time on the auction house. This mount isn’t even half as P2W as people would have you believe.
Edit: I stand corrected, you can purchase tokens and turn them into game time, but I didn’t know they could be turned into $15 battle net balance. This mount does, indeed, cost less gold than the original Brutosaur (or did before token prices skyrocketed)
I’m positive I couldnt beat Metal Gear Solid 4 again 16 years later. One of the final sequences involves what felt like a 15 minute button mashing section that took extremely in shape 20 somthing me to my limit. My fucking forearms cramped like a really bad period
Most games these days have a setting in the accessibility settings section to change tapping to holding, and that’s always one of the first things I check.
I made that mistake with AC Unity. Got sent from the 6th section all the way back to the 4th. Nearly a year later and I still haven’t picked it back up to finish it
Agreed. It might not be the best one but I have a real soft spot for revelations, old man Ezio is a very compelling character, the setting, wrapping up arc for characters. We get plenty of Egypt in games but I can recall ever getting the Ottoman Empire.
Also Unity is underrated, if it had been polished at launch I hold it would have been the best game in the original style gameplay series by far.
I think Unity’s main issue was they marketed the multiplayer heavily, but it was only in the game for an extremely limited number of missions.
They managed to annoy single player gamers and multiplayer gamers in one stroke.
They got overambitious with the crowds as well, leading to poor performance on consoles, along with a whole load of weird bugs. I played it on PC years later (maybe when the Notre Dame burned down?) and there were still parts of the game bugged, or chugged down to 20 fps for no reason.
I don’t hate them as games, but the need for gear to be able to actually do assassinations on the bigger guys somewhat makes it not an AC game any more. Still the same slightly tired gameplay, but the one element that made it satisfying is no longer there.
I have a job. I am currently getting ready to go to it. Then, since it is now Friday. I’m gonna order a god damned large pizza and then I’mma sit down in front of my big ass television set and play video games and eat pizza till I’m too tired to do either anymore.
Which, because I’m fucking old now, will probably be around 10:00 p.m. 😢
To summarize or if the link breaks, one of the devs “knew beforehand” they’d have to require PSN accounts post launch, but disabled them for a smooth launch. That’s interesting, but as long as Sony was acting as publisher I feel like the blame still goes on them for selling the game to non-PSN countries initially.
I quite like how Sniper elite handles this. As you are tagging enemies, small snippets about them pop up. So the Nazi you have in your scopes might love jazz music even though it’s illegal, or might draw caricatures of his fellow soldiers that give them some light hearted relief or might have tried out for the ss and failed the medical and takes his anger out on the locals.
It genuinely changes how I play the game. If they seem like they are just someone caught in the Nazi machine I tend to spare them if I can but I make pretty sure to end the true believers.
Back in 97 my older sister got a both babe job at E3 and got extra tickets for me and my mom to take me. This is back when it was strictly a trade conference and not really open to the public. I was waiting in line for a new Gameboy game when a dude overhead me rambling to my mom about the Brady guides I loved to read so much back then (my mom is a patient saint haha) when a dude in line interrupted me and told my mom about his website that had free guides for all the new games online. My mom was pretty excited about free guides and he handed her his card which I looked at eagerly, it was Jeff Veasey, the creator of gamefaqs.com.
I can’t tell you how much of my parents toner i burnt through over the years printing from that website, it was probably cheaper to just buy the guides haha. Still one of my all time favorite sites.
Oh yeah that Gameboy game I was waiting to see was some new Japanese monster game called Pokemon.
lemmy.world
Ważne