Considering Gabe is ex-microsoft and wants to distance himself as much as possible from them, I highly doubt that’d work, he’d go down fighting at the very least.
Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.
He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It's literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.
I really don't get why people think he's all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn't sell, theft and litigation.
Not saying he’s different from other rich people, but Valve developing both SteamOS and Proton is a clear message they don’t want to rely on Microsoft and their software.
Microsoft doesn't want to rely on licensed software every time they install their programs either. Again, Valve taking a queue from MS. And that's fine BTW, the whole industry follows MS.
Moreover the real issue, the difference in computing cost between running Win10 with all the unnecessary boost vs Linux is massive. Had they used Windows it would've costed more to be able to run less.
As to being reliant on Windows, that's been their standard most of their history. Steam was Windows based. If Windows were to go ahead with making a stripped down Windows OS that was specific to gaming, such as the one demoed in a code jam earlier this year, you can bet steam would be selling that version of Windows direct from their store, and likely have a easy tool ready to use to install it to your deck. They would probably offer it as an installation option too. Why not? There's no good reason they shouldn't. The whole verified question goes out the window. That's huge. But again, MS controls that situation, not Valve. They're still reliant on MS in major ways.
Sam Coe: “Y’know, captain, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been talking about myself for a long time, but I’ve never really asked you about yourself. It seems to me that you’re a mute of some kind, and everyone just talks AT you, rather than TO you. So I’ve got to ask you, how does a Chef like yourself end up working for a mining company on Narion?”
[Camera turns 180° degrees to face the player like in BG3]
• My name’s FuntyMcCraiger and I used to run a restaurant before we ran into hard times.
You know, mining is a lot like cooking. I like mining rocks.
• That’s none of your business. After being mute for 80 hours, I’ve decided to have good dialogue and good writing because they paid their writers a living wage.
• Shut the fuck up, Sam Coe.
• Can you smell what the FuntyMcCraiger is cooking?
MW3 was the one where Russia invades the US, right? That one was good. I think the next one, BO2, was the last one I played. After that, they really fell into the rut of minor iteration.
I might get around to playing some of the others that aren’t in the “high tech” genre. Apparently there was one set during Desert Storm.
Infinite warfare was great, at least the story mode: they went completely off the rails and let you choose where your spaceship goes for the next mission
The new games aren’t all bad for the campaigns. MW2019 was pretty good and Black Ops 6 had a really fun campaign, it had a pretty good story too at least til the end.
I wouldn’t call EA anywhere close to the worst company in the world.
Serious contenders based on their overall effect on humanity would be Monsanto, RTX, Aramco, UnitedHealth and Nestlé.
It’s from PC Gamer, so I think it’s safe to say they mean worst gaming company in the world. They could have said that though.
Even limited to gaming, EA, Ubisoft, and Activision have always been pretty much tied for it. Now Activision is part of Microsoft, and I think with both Activision and Bethesda and the shit the latter has caused lately, I think we can bump Ubisoft out. And I think when Copilot gaming rolls out, whatever they’re calling that, they’ll be worse than EA was before. The problem with EA isn’t so much what they were before though, it’s what they’ll be under SA leadership.
Gaming by megacorps has never been good for gamers, and it’s going to get worse. And yet people keep supporting them.
It’s an AI assistant in your game that will help you, tell you where to go and whatnot by using Copilot to help by analysing your game.
Doesn’t sound too bad, I mean who cares if they see what you’re playing or how (bad) you’re playing? It’s just weird. Like the generations after mine used GameFAQs, or asked on Reddit, or watched YouTube videos. My generation read Nintendo Power, and shared tips on the playground or at school, whether we read it in a magazine or discovered it on our own. There were 1-900 numbers you could call, but no one I know called them. Maybe the rich kids did? I was forbidden from doing so (by my parents) and I never did. But that was actually another option. Like, Nintendo operated one. I think some of the third-party gaming magazines may have, as well. You could also write in, and maybe they’d publish your letter and a response, but that would take months.
The only way I can see this shit working is like a search engine that do AI summarizing. They can’t trained Copilot to “learn” about the newest game. This shit looks more like marketing bullshit than anything, any AI that can search the internet will do just fine.
I think some of the third-party gaming magazines may have, as well. You could also write in, and maybe they’d publish your letter and a response, but that would take months.
LOL, I had some of these magazines but at the time internet was already a thing, sounds painful to wait months for a response on how to beat X game.
That’s my thought as well, that it will just source IGN and other sites and scrape the data.
Also, people calling EA the worst company in the world seem to forget that EA published the Mass Effect trilogy. I just noticed that yesterday, their copyright is at the bottom but the EA logo isn’t shown when it (the Mass Effect Legendary Trilogy remaster) boots up. Just the Mass Effect-themed Bioware animation.
EA also published the Rockband games, trying to save the rhythm gaming industry from Activision, which tried to kill it after the developer (Harmonix) left. They got Neversoft (of Tony Hawk games fame) to repackage Guitar Hero 2 with more songs and limp along after it, but once Rockband came out and they added vocals and drums, Guitar Hero was basically done… so Activision flooded the market with slop. I’m not saying EA did anything heroic, they just gave the rhythm game developer a platform to publish on. I don’t think Rockband was ever profitable, but they all damn sure tried. Rockband 3 is also one of the reasons you have mods on console at all. It was part of the pilot program for Microsoft’s XNA, which brought user content to Xbox users. Games too, but most sucked. The real kicker was that anybody could put songs in Rockband, and some indie bands converted their entire catalogue. PC game modding had been a thing long before, but console users getting fan-made content in a game was simply not a thing before then. Even today, people make custom songs for the modded Rockband 3 Deluxe (which requires a modded console, adds a bunch of quality of life features) or computer ports like YARG (Yet Another Rhythm Game).
When I was a kid, EA published a paint program, Deluxe Paint, on the Amiga. Not really gaming related, but it was an awesome paint program and did stuff you still don’t see in drawing/paint programs in 2025, paid or free (DPaint was paid; my father bought it on floppy disk in a cardboard sleeve with a manual and everything).
So yeah. Way worse companies out there. But I’m not gonna excuse the shit EA got into. I do think Microsoft is worse, between Copilot stuff, Activision, and Bethesda.
Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
unlike many printed guides, gamefaqs guides came out some time after game release, because average people didn’t have preview versions of the game to play
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
I’m sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.
I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector’s market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it’s pretty clear what caused their decline.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think.
Emphasis mine, that’s exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don’t. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I’m playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we’re in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.
Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).
Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.
Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs.
I’ve heard lots about acquisitions of games media as they’ve nearly all gone independent lately, especially Giant Bomb, who was part of this family. CNET certainly believed it could make them money, but hardly any of this stuff made anyone any money as they changed hands multiple times. At the very least, it could benefit from economies of scale around securing ads in one deal and displaying them in multiple places, but advertisers paid out less for traditional ads on static web pages at the same time that video ad spending was increasing.
But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least.
Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn't line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't have an impact. I'm saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it's partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.
And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).
Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.
Something’s that’s easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360’s release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.
I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.
It’s like social media adoption. The mass market didn’t jump in until a generation later.
The current government strategy of illegal use of copyrighted materials, often with the full understanding that the artist/IP owners will not consent to it should really have a harsher punishment to it. The DHS social media pages in particular keep using songs without artist permission because they know it will be taken down but by that point it doesn’t matter and they just steal another song. Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist, this should absolutely count as the rights of the artists to free speech are being infringed upon.
Yeah it almost reads like Microsoft has endorsed the Trump administration and its marketing. Like a forced brand crossover. These things aid in the far right pipeline. Has young men thinking hating immigrants is as cool and mainstream as Halo.
It’s quite literally the least bad thing they’ve done across two terms in office.
Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist
Who seriously believes that? We’re so beyond “Death of the Artist” at this point. FFS, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the chorus line of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” played full on patriotically, without a tinge of irony or self-reflection.
If an artist consents to the use of their song in a specific way, it’s not a matter of belief at all. It just is tacit approval. So when the government does this without consent, until the moment the artist responds, the implication is that the artist has approved it. Which isn’t as big a deal if a private entity does it, but it’s a much bigger deal when the federal government does it.
What sucks on my end is that this has only been the latest in a long chain of reasons to boycott Microsoft - so I can’t exactly claim, if they take a step back from “Systematically murdering innocent people” then I’ll go back to giving them money.
Basically there’s been right wing/terf/anti-furry think tanks lobbying those companies to stop offering services to anyone involved with porn. Their entire ideology is “perverted nerds are causing the downfall of western society”.
So tone deaf, and clearly they’re just trying to steer the narrative.
They call out that it’s never taken lightly and it has to happen. We know. Stop killing games just says you have to do something when you turn off the servers. Either release the server source code so it can be engineered by the community, release a self hostage server alternative, even just documents or guides on how to get started.
But they’re going to try to make it about the mean old gamers want them to go broke
I’m with you. Very puritan, kinkshaming article. Stellar Blade might not be my thing, but I know not to yuck people’s yum. One could take the opportunity to discuss sexual objectification, but apparently that’s off the table.
It just feels too easy. There’s so much good grind in this game, and it feels like there is very little reason to grind agility anymore other than clout, and even then now there is far less clout in having 99.
I don’t really agree with that. My reason for grinding agility was never to get stamina back faster, but to get the shortcuts. Once I got the ones I needed, It became about getting to 99.
And with the amount of people with 99 in agility now, there is absolutely no clout to chase. Hasn’t been for 10 years really.
It’s also not like it was made easier to 99, it just got less shitty having a low level.
I mean, it really depends on how you define scam. If you’re so loose with the definition that you would have considered No Man’s Sky a “scam” when it first released, then I can understand that.
Otherwise it’s not really a scam. There’s a free trial going on right now in Star Citizen.You’re free to check out the game for yourself. It’s in a really good state compared to what we’ve previously seen (not even close to bug free, but way more playable than before).
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