Wonderful news! I have never played and don’t intend to, but I’m happy for everybody involved.
Let’s hope the team will lead with example and that this event opens up for the possibility for other online games to be preserved in a similar fashion.
CS2 is infintely worse imo than CS:GO. Yes, the maps got updated but local multiplayer works way worse and the bots are a laughable mess. Took me days to get working properly on debian too.
This is only using on-screen information, but making it more visible? Why is this a cheat, exactly? Was that one guy cheating in the shooter game where his cat would paw at the screen when it noticed invisible people moving with a Predator-like shimmer effect?
This article didn’t research the VR bits…Gabe has said multiple times, even recently, that they are working steadily on VR and it’s hardware. Their next headset even has a codename, Deckard.
Also, I don’t think most people realize Valve doesn’t have much of an internal structure. It more resembles a community of people working together because they want to.
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
Why is it so hard for companies to build a game launcher that doesn’t suck? Is it just a lowest bidder situation?
I think it’s just priorities, those other companies weren’t interested in making a launcher, they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.
Steam started out like that in appearance at least, nobody really wanted it and it was kind of forced on you if you wanted to play HL2 but since Valve seemed to understand the value in a platform like steam and actually work at making it good it became pretty good.
At this point it’s actually kind of hard to fully appreciate how much work has gone into steam. Not just the basic stuff like chat and forums and a store with a functioning search, or the banal stuff like inventories and trading cards and points I still don’t understand, but also the stuff most people don’t see like all the stuff for developers launching a game on steam and managing sales and keys and betas. Not to mention all the experiments they’ve done along the way to try and figure out what the best way forward is.
Steam is kind of a huge undertaking and unless a company is really invested in competing with it they’re simply not going to be able to.
IMO my favorite launcher to use out of all is probably Battle.net, even over Steam. This is probably mostly because Steam is terrible unresponsive and its startup is still kinda ass (I just tested the start and noticed its 3 fucking loading screens: Verifying installtion, Logging in and finally loading the page. All as separate windows).
If your goal was only to make a good launcher, it would be easy. If your goal is a lot of DRM shenanigans as if we were still in 1998, it’s really hard.
Kinda. Frostpunk, I felt I had to choose between multiple bad choices. Where this is a bit more optimistic.
It’s more RTS-feeling, where you can CHOOSE to go to that route, and just roll with the punches. And it’s so sweet when your choices line up to the danger.
Back then Amiga computers were at their peak, it wasn’t uncommon for a whole game to be on a single 1.44 MB floppy. It was also pretty common that booting from the disk was the only way to launch the game.
I guess it’s good that devs don’t need to optimize as much as they had to, but I also feel like we’ve collectively allowed the laziness to go too far, with 110gb updates and stuff.
I personally would prefer spending my time building new stuff, but I think if I had to, optimizing can also be fun and interesting in its own way.
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