I don’t really know why they feel they need to Cave to Russian pressure here. They have all the cards. Russia will never ever stop Steam from running in Russia. If they try to cut off Counter-Strike the entire country would collapse immediately. I’m 100% serious that is not sarcasm at all.
I mean, there’s DRM but that hasn’t stopped them ever before…
Do they stand to lose something if they switch? I don’t understand CS:GO economics, maybe there is a sanction-evading money flow via weapon and skin trading on Valve’s servers?
Unlikely? There are 3rd party websites that allow liquidation, but that’s all outside of Valve’s sites. The closest you can get to liquidation officially is buying Valve hardware like a Steam Deck with your store credit, but they don’t ship steam hardware to russia.
I wasn’t saying the exchange for money happens on Valve’s servers, but it’s Valve who oversees everyone’s inventory. You could hack the game and run a third party account server and give yourself all the knives but they would not be recognized by Valve and thus worthless, unless you convince exchanges that your server is trustworthy and has assets behind it.
Ah in terms of the Steam inventory API, it’s completely unregulated. All purchases are steam platform only, but trades between players are unmonitored (with the exception of requiring both sides to authenticate the trade).
I wish they’d expand on it and have a filter for player count in co-op. I have a game group of five and finding co-op, 5 player games is hard/most of them cap at 4.
The ones that don’t cap at 4 and aren’t requiring high dexterity (i.e. fps) are base building survival games all the way down— which are fine for the most part, don’t get me wrong, I just wish we could find something with the production quality and premise of Outlast Trials.
So far we’ve done: Conan Exiles, The Forest (1 & 2), Astroneer, Core Keeper, Return to Moria, Green Hell (may have been before we were at 4), Demonic, Deep Rock (with a 5 player mod), and a little REPO (which was good, but no progression system yet). I wanted to try Barotrauma but the puppet movement’s a bit janky for me.
I know there’s a third party search engine I can use, but it’s sooo full of junk it’s hard to find anything worthwhile.
Looking forward to The Big Walk, and am keeping an eye on Dune when it comes to consoles.
Do you know about co-optimus.com? Is that the “third party” you mentioned?
I don’t know of anything better. Setting your filter and sorting by user rating is pretty effective. Aside from that I sort by release date and check back every now and then.
Aside from that I sort by release date and check back every now and then.
I just now noticed they had a toggle for ‘Released,’ so I don’t have to see a bunch of TBD games. I’m just gonna start doing what you’re doing and keep an eye on the list once in a while. Thank you for the tip!
I have fond memories of Hexen. But most of those are overridden by it being the unfortunate game where I finally realized that first person games make me motion sick.
“Oof, I don’t feel so hot. Let me keep playing to keep my mind off of it. Maybe a bite to eat. Back to the game, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m…” running to the bathroom and honking up everything I just ate and then some until I’m dry-heaving. I didn’t eat hot dogs for a good five years after that.
The title is a bit missleading considering that the actual article mentions a lot other problems that plagued the development.
Project 8 faced both progress and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult, but some quality improvements were achieved. However, critical issues persisted, causing delays and budget increases. The latest review revealed unresolved problems needing more time and money, along with revised sales forecasts, raising doubts about the project’s profitability.
– TLDR by Microsoft copilot
While there’s still demand for “narrative-driven story-rich games” one should keep realistic expectations. For this genre I feel smaller scope and indie developers work much better.
“The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult,”
Makes me suspect they were woefully behind the rest of the field in development practices. My team, and many others, gained productivity when all the wasteful manager ego stroking in-person meetings stopped.
Alternately, it tells us they rely on a weird dev kit with a lot of esoteric hardware. Though I would still call that out as being super out of date. Nothing is particularly hard to emulate today, for teams that prioritize having rebuildable test environmenta.
Just wild.
Bummer about the layoffs. Probably won’t fix their agility problem, though.
I think it’s probably true though. I pitched my game to them and they graciously responded and said they are looking into publishing narrative driven games but rather mechanically complex games.
I’ll be honest, I thought this was gonna be a thoughtless rage-bait click getter. Instead, it was a fascinating examination of what a Space Marine really is, through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. I’m glad I read that.
I agree. I only have shallow knowledge of 40k, but the exploration of the history around the universe was very fascinating. I also think it’s interesting that this issue seems to occur with satire, particularly when involving fascism. It brings to mind starship troopers and the more recent helldivers, how so many miss the point. I can’t help but feel the glorification of the military and military service in many of today’s societies lends itself to this problem. The military is inherently authoritarian, against diversity (including diversity of thought), and intentionally dehumanizes “the enemy” (turns out, it isn’t easy to kill people). Couple this with an image of masculinity that centers around adversity at best, and violence at worst along with so many men who feel they have missed opportunities to meet this standard and you have a recipe for fascists. How do we address this within our society? I don’t have the answers, but we should all be thinking about it.
You might think the failure of Embracer would maybe make regulators start acting on the mass conglomerization of media companies instead of hand waving everything through assuming the free market will provide.
Most of the companies’ Embracer is closing aren’t even unprofitable. They were/are doing fine even if their games weren’t big hits. Embracer just can’t pay its bills.
Unfortunately, I doubt it'll have much of an impact. Most of the properties/studios Embracer owns aren't popular enough to get people to make noise about it. And people don't tend to see the bigger picture - especially when these stories about studio closures are trickling out rather than all happening at once. I'm sure there'll be a lot of talk about it if something happens to do with Gearbox/Borderlands or The Lord Of The Rings, or if multiple studios all get shuttered at once, but other than that, I expect it'll just be small stories that continue to fly under the radar.
And regulators don't seem to care about video games unless people make noise. They get involved in things like loot box regulations or Microsoft acquiring Activision because those are big deals that almost everyone in the gaming sphere has an opinion on. But unfortunately, I don't see Piranha Bytes having issues or being closed getting enough attention for anything to change.
To be fair, it was always priced accordingly, and it wasn't in "early access", even though they still had something to deliver there. What they delivered for the story mode for this game had some really neat ideas that I'd love to see other fighting games steal from them. It also lacked a compelling call to action and got bogged down with traversable area maps with NPCs that you could talk to for no benefit or interesting story reasons.
Crowdfunding-driven projects often have depressing fates, but probably not even a partial result would have existed if not for that.
Feels like if it was not for that Evo drama at the year they were selected as one of the competing games, maybe they would have sold well enough to finish.
I thought the game awards were like the Oscars in that they are supposed to ignore the commercial success of the nominations? (Never follow that stuff so I could be completely wrong.)
I was looking forward to cities 2. When I heard it had crippling performance issues, I decided to wait. Still haven’t gotten back around to it. There are just too many other games that already work for me to put up with broken new releases.
It was the sheer quantity of dlc stuff along with the second one having potential performance issues that kept me way and away from it for now. I’ll check back in at a 50-90% off sale.
Update 26th April 2024: As has been pointed out to me overnight by a thousand helpful, furious strangers, describing a Sega fangame (one with Saturn button prompts, no less) as “SNES-style” is a crime deserving of imprisonment in the deepest depths of the Labyrinth Zone. Speaking as a former Genesis/Mega Drive diehard, I can only hang my head.
My biggest problem is, they banned with this method, all the games that are targeted for adults but not porn, or gore. Like they hate spicy food and banned all things that are not white rice and unseasoned chicken breast.
It was really hard to find deep philosophical games which are good and are not containing porn or gore, but targeted to adults. Now its imposaible. They have literraly no platform. Unlike the porn games, they have many aside from steam and itch.
From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.
That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.
There is just something about coq that feels bad. I play CDDA, i play elona, i dabble in DF, and i play the heck out of kenshi, but coq just doesn’t click. Maybe it’s the UI, maybe the game just doesn’t feel as deep or as rewarding to explore.
Like I feel they should want right wing nuts to be mad about the game. They won’t stop talking about media that are mad about and so many conservatives will still buy the thing even just to destroy it and virtue signal to the other idiots.
The left? Some may still buy it, but most don’t talk about it at all. The idea of “go woke go broke” has always been a message of intent, not reality, at least in the modern era.
Nothing makes me want to try a game or watch a show more than legitimate, non surface level representation that incels whine about.
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