Because it's not quite the good-faith gesture people are making it out to be; it's a cost-saving measure for Valve. From the consumer standpoint, very little actually changes, as the average user isn't taking Valve to court in the first place. It's not as if Valve is suddenly lowering their legal funding in conjunction with this move; they'll still defend themselves harder than most consumers would be able to, and will win their cases in court instead of in arbitration, which is even more costly for the consumer when they lose.
While arbitration favors companies, so do the courts. If anything, this just makes it more cost-prohibitive on the consumer side to make Valve face the law.
So if it's worse for the consumer for valve to allow class action lawsuits, then should the consumer see all the other companies who force arbitration as the better outcome?
Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn't just say "come sue us" if they weren't wholly confident that they weren't about to be losing any cases any time soon.
This isn't some huge "win" for the people; gamers aren't gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam's userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.
Other companies didn’t pay the arbitration fee so valves system was a bit better than the rest. Realistically, the consumer always gets fucked.
The point is more that Steam is getting praised for this, while it’s just to make class action lawsuits, like the one they were just served with for their anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviors, much costlier for the other party.
Except it doesn’t make class actions more expensive, because it removes the step of invalidating the arbitration clause.
Footing the bill for arbitration was pro-consumer. They abandoned the whole thing because of bad faith frivolous lawsuit spam trying to extort settlements, not for any other reason.
Hell, Epic does not have any social features, didn’t have cart, refund process through support only, very basic search, I am not sure about cloud saves and if they don’t break completely when you play offline (is there even offline mode?).
Steam, on the other hand, is constantly adding and improving features - like the new beta family sharing which is finally what an easy way to share with my GF and sister.
The only things that Epic has are free games, exclusivity, and lower fees - and that’s about it. All three, as you can see, are not really hard to implement for the developer team, but easy to throw large sums of money at for a quick boost so they can boast numbers.
Fuck Epic, seriously. Money can solve lots of stuff, but not by throwing it at the wall. Meaningless.
Oh, completely forgot about my Steam Deck, it is just that seamless.
I also hate the other side of the coin that is against both Steam and EGS. Citing Steam doesn’t “deserve your loyalty”. Why not? I can’t really pinpoint any particular fuckup in the 15 years I’ve been using it. Sure, some delays in games, updates, and other minor shit - but imagine if like game ratings broke, I am sure they’d get fixed in an hour.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, in just a few years time, pre-AI-era content of all kinds, not just games, ends up becoming cherished by people, to the point that entire fandoms and subcultures develop around preserving and promoting it.
This is no different than anything else, we naturally appreciate the skill it takes to create something entirely by hand, even if mass production is available.
The games will still be designed by humans. Generative AI will only be used as a tool in the workflow for creating certain assets faster, or for creating certain kinds of interactivity on the fly. It’s not good enough to wholesale create large sets of matching assets, and despite what folks may think, it won’t be for a long time, if ever. Not to mention, people just don’t want that. People want art to have intentional meaning, not computer generated slop.
Plenty of games still rely on procedural generation to different degrees. It's a huge selling point in many cases, and in others, it's a pillar of their genre.
Oh yeah, I don’t have time to play my main Elite:Dangerous profile anymore but I’ll totally have time to use my free Epic license to plaster my name across the galaxy on deep space exploration.
Not sure if joking… But someone did take advantage of the 3rdgparty heat map and spent a couple dozen hours of game time drawing this dick in the galaxy
That’s how it was for me in 2017. The path of totality went right over my house. I took the day off and strolled out to my back yard to watch it. We also smoked some meat and invited people over for a party, which was the most effort in the whole situation.
It’s a ridiculous metric anyway. There are dozens of ancient MMOS that still manage to crawl along because a few hundred subscribers is enough to fund one or two developers in maintenance mode effectively forever. See also indie studios like Spiderweb Software who’ve been sustainably selling games to their fans for decades. See also indie roguelike devs who manage to make their one game a job by having a patreon and a few hundred fans. See also retrogaming. See also the boomer shooter renaissance.
Games on the whole have never been less dead, unless their studio intentionally smothers them by shutting down servers and locking off access.
They’ve proven they can’t be trusted. The people who devised and attempted to enact this plan - the exec team - have not gone anywhere, and they aren’t going to. They have shown the industry who they are, and they clearly don’t give a shit about business ethics or even legality (the AppLovin shit smells an awful fucking lot like anticompetitive market interference). They will definitely try something similar in the future.
Titan is a place where methane and ethane rain from the sky and have a hydrologic cycle like the kind we’ve only ever seen before with water on Earth. These organics form rivers and flow into seas, carrying sediment with them. This mission will be going to the equatorial desert to understand that sediment.
Titan, like Europa, is an icy ocean moon. Titan is even larger, though. While Europa’s ocean is measured to have about twice the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined, Titan’s ocean (which possibly has significant quantities of ammonia and organics and alcohols mixed in) has five times the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined.
Sitting atop this ocean is a thick icy crust, upon which is a surface that looks more earth-like than any other planetoid surface in our solar system. Although it looks earth-like, the chemistry is in fact fundamentally different. It is based around organic solvents instead of water as the dominant driver of weather and erosion. The water on titan is stored in the bedrock!
And the sediment on top? Well, titan’s atmosphere is 5% methane. That methane gets hit by UV light and turns into more complex organics. Titan’s atmosphere is also rich in nitrogen and carbon monoxide, which add Nitrogen and Oxygen to these complex organics. These organics sediment out and coat the surface. Around the equator, they blow into large dunes in a desert biome. Precipitation falls and erodes the tar-covered landscape. These complex organics get mixed together as sediment in the rivers and dumped into the beds of the polar lakes and seas.
Dragonfly isn’t going to the seas. Too dangerous for the first mission here. We don’t know what we’ll find, and it’s hard to communicate with earth, and there is complex weather and clouds called the “polar hood” that might interfere. Dragonfly is going to the desert, to observe the complex organics falling from the sky and gathering on the ground to be blown into dunes. These are the ingredients that will get mixed together in the seas. There is also a cool crater there that calculations suggest melted the H2O bedrock and created a water-filled pool for the organics that has long-since frozen over. However, calculations suggest that this liquid water pool full of organics may have stayed partially liquid for hundreds of thousands of years in the subsurface. This is a location where we can study: “what happens if you take a bunch of complex organics and add water?” How far along the path to life could they get before the snapshot was frozen?
The article points out how other sites and articles are calling it a dead game due to the fact it doesn’t have the 1.5 million concurrent players now (it did in Feb). Not that’s it’s been abandoned by the developer, but that is not getting the daily player counts that games as a services expect and how this game is bucking that trend and it’s a good thing.
I wasn’t aware Palword was supposed to be a game as a service.
To me game as a service are games like world or warcraft or apex legends.
Their whole point is to get money by microtransactions and recurring payments using constant new content to keep players engaged.
You’re making the same points as the article (and the devs), hence OP stating that what he posted is not the “clickbait journalism” that you appeared to accuse it of being originally.
If you were saying the other articles referred to in the headline are clickbait journalism, then I’m pretty sure we’re all on the same page. Your phrasing was just a little ambiguous at first.
Honestly, this article shouldn’t be called how to. I’m trying to make heads or tails of this documentation but I would love to see more. I just want to recompile Mystical Ninja starring Goemon as it’s my favorite N64 game from my childhood.
Is that related to Goemon’s Great Adventure? I played that a ton but I never really understood if it was a franchise, a one off, etc. I think I was just too young at the time to understand much beyond smacking monsters with a pipe lol
It is! I‘ve ever only known it as „Goemon 2“ and it‘s very different from the first game (it‘s a 2.5D sidescroller) but also a fantastic game IMO. The first game is kinda like an N64 Zelda game… Kinda.
Man anyone saying this is a bad thing has never been through arbitration before. It’s basically a room full of lawyers getting paid to waste your time and money just to fuck you over later. Course as I type that it kind of sounds like all lawyers…
I gave Epic’s store a chance but even after all this time it’s still shit and very far from feature parity with Steam. There’s not even proper reviews. No big-picture equivalent. No good out-of-the-box Linux support. No Steam-Deck. The list is very very long. Until Epic starts delivering, the 30% cut Valve takes is more than justified.
I gave it a chance when they took over Rocket League. The damn platform doesn’t even support profile avatars while Steam did. So to get a basic nice feature working all you had to do was… not use their platform.
Oh really? I haven’t played since they disabled trading items.
I mean, the cyber truck probably looks better than some of the other cars, and you’ll probably get better FPS due to the lowered polygon count! But yeah… no bueno.
Heroic launcher works pretty well to get epic and gog games in the deck. But yes, support could be better, especially since i remember unreal tournament being Linux friendly early on.
Yeah i get and play the free games from there, but they don’t seem to want to do more than the bare minimum for the storefront so I won’t purchase anything through them.
It’s beyond me how they can affors all of these free games and exclusive but not a single capable developer to make this platform beyond just the bare minimum.
FWIW, my understanding is that the owner of Epic is actively anti-Linux, so your third feature is a unlikely at best. The fourth was only remotely likely due to market share.
arstechnica.com
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