Give all players a pause limit. A certain number of minutes per game and per pause, and a number of pauses. Players can’t pause anymore after going over their time limit or pause count limit. The game resumes after a pause’s time limit is reached.
Pausing should happen after a delay of a certain number of seconds. So a player hits pause, countdown starts before actually pausing.
Resuming from a pause also has a timer.
Players’ pause stats are retained. People who take more pauses or spend more time pausing the game get matched with each other.
Sometimes day to day life sucks, we need to escape into games we like and look past all the privacy and annoying bullshit. But when nearly all games are this way, easy to step back and go “wait a minute…”
When (not if) enshittification takes over, I’ll pirate their shit.
You can't blatantly assume all games are like what AAA is. Indie development is the beacon that says that games can still be made simple, without all of the corporate fluff and shit jammed into it.
I truly hate to even consider this, but indie games have already started to turn, and will start to go more towards the same issues.
What valve did for gaming and capitalism in 2004, they need to undo or come up with a new solution or something, or maybe somebody else. I’m not sure if communism or anarchy or a new capitalism or a creative solution that fixes everything and makes everybody happy and is ethically sound and sustainable. But the amount of AI slop and desperation that current capitalism is fucking everybody with is only going to get worse.
The “indie games are our salvation, our guiding light” was ten years ago, and AI is here to stay, for whatever effects and changes it brings, because it’s affecting literally all aspects of our lives because we live in a capitalistic society where tech and information is utilized by and affects the entire planet and every single human being, plant, and animal.
There are only 3 developers I will preorder from whenever I find the game they are releasing interesting. Erin “Concerned Ape” (Stardew Valley); Bob the Bot (Survivalist); and Terry Cavanagh, the creator of VVVVVV.
They keep their games updated, they are pretty chill people, and they keep players informed during development.
For now, they are the only ones who have earned my trust.
For everything else, it’s full patientgamer mode for me. Wait until the whole game is released with a single price tag, 90% discount, no online requirements outside of multiplayer, and community fixes.
Only thing I’ve been running personally has been Reno DX, to add HDR while not departing from the original look. Nice to cleanup all the colour banding on the dynamic lights in dark areas, such as the constant spotlight on Hornet. And yes, it works just fine through Proton, although I had to install it with a prepped zip file from some Reddit thread.
Here’s my last judge fight if you want to see the results (note that YT only offers HDR output on HDR compatible displays).
I’ve been playing 7 remake a bit and I know a lot of additions were meant to flesh out the world in what’s actually a really small chunk of the original game. But I found a lot of the additions, though not all, to feel more like unnecessary padding than good fleshing out.
Last game I ever bought was minecraft, back in 2012(?) for $15. Played it non-stop for a decade before the community imploded. Got my money’s worth. Haven’t bought a game since. No point unless they have a similarly active multiplayer community. It’s a pirate’s life for me.
Somewhere in that neighbourhood, yes. That’s how much I’m willing to pay. My old carrom board lasted me two decades, and it was $30 (with discs). That’s the yardstick I measure games by.
It is to be noted that that $30 does not account for the amount of powder used to lubricate the board or the replacement discs. Just as I did not include the cost of upgrading my PC to run minecraft 1.18, the dogshit optimization update.
It is also to be noted that I bought minecraft only after I was sure that I would enjoy it. That’s why I played the cracked version for 3 years before my purchase.
That does seem a little out of bounds. I think my personal is about 30 cents per hour. My favorite games are probably in the realm of 1-5 cents per hour.
The ones I look back on and cringe are MMOs. Those were surely pushing 50 cents or more per hour. Maybe if I had been a hardcore dungeon/raider and sank 12 hours a weekend into them they would be alright, but my filthy casual ass didn’t put more than a few hours a week into them. It’s honestly why I still avoid any subscription to this day. It’s always the other side gambling you won’t use their product, and that always strikes me as setting up bad deals.
My usual thought process is going to the movies sets you back maybe 10-15 for two hours. If the game is under that it’s usually fine by me, they are usually way under that even though I tend to move on from most games rather quickly.
See, that’s wild to me. I would buy a movie for that price, and it would be watched multiple times over my use of it. I don’t go to the movie theater because, aside from the experience often being ruined by other people, why would I leave my house to have the same experience I could in my house? The other people don’t add to it, the overpriced snacks don’t add to it, and the accumulated filth on the floor and chair definitely don’t add to it. Having a larger screen to look at doesn’t really do all that much. In my memories, the fact that I watched it on a 50 inch screen or a 50 foot screen doesn’t even show up. I remember the story, not the method of input.
Uh, but back to the point. I think most of my movies that I own have been watched at least 4 times, which means give or take $12/6 hours. That’s almost too high, which is why I don’t buy movies much anymore. Netflix was fine for a while, since it was probably a couple dozen hours binge for the month subscription, then cancel it again. I really don’t like ‘moving on’ from games quickly. A short one with a story is alright, but I want 50 hours of enjoyment, minimum, out of a game. Otherwise I could just find another game that I really enjoy for that long.
There’s so much competition in gaming right now, and good AAA games are so few and far between, that I don’t see a need for piracy. For every $90 piece of garbage there are ten $20 diamonds (don’t forget Devolver in your list of good small companies). I don’t ever buy dlc/deluxe/etc editions unless the company/game has earned it (almost never).
I will admit, Rockstar creates some high quality experiences, but their monetization practices are down there with the worst of them.
I can’t justify not pirating, I just think for me the motivation isn’t strong enough right now. Too many affordable good games to choose from.
Too many investors coming off cheap, obvious ripoff games for a mobile telephone.
The trump family of asshole con-men just bought EA. Everything from now until they’re sold off for scrap is not only completely worthless, is actively hostile to users.
It’s a sign that the cons and grifting has 100% fully come to Computer games. Many have exploited them before, but not like this.
I am not going to discuss the ethics of piracy because I genuinely don’t give a fuck (also the vast majority of people don’t know the difference between ethics and morality and insist whatever they do is Good so it is even less productive than slamming my hand in a cabinet).
But if your goal is to actually not support those companies? Don’t play the games. Because “Wow, Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is still going to encourage others to buy it. Even if you say “Wow, I am so glad I pirated it because Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is going to encourage people who don’t know how/don’t care to pirate things to buy it (and people are going to think you are an obnoxious edgelord).
And yeah, I’ll parrot others: If you think games are in a bad place (from a monetization and content perspective… not from a funding and censorship one) then that just tells me that you don’t actually care enough to follow indie devs.
Man ea and Ubisoft games suck so bad I don’t even bother pirating them. I’m not even being facetious, the last ea game I played was the dead space remake which was passable but also totally skippable, and I borrowed a friends ea account to do that, getting bored half way through and stopping. Had he not offered I’d not have played it at all. I think the last ea game I paid and played through was mass effect 2.
Same thing with Ubisoft. I briefly had gamepass and played AC Odyssey for three hours before losing interest, same with their terrible Greek botw wannabe.
Neither company has released anything I’ve even been interested in since that, years and years ago.
That said I still buy rockstar games, the amount of money, effort, and attention to detail that went into Red Dead 2 is simply breath taking, but by the same token i bought it for twenty bucks after pirating it to make sure i liked it and it ran well.
Other than that I’m on the same page as you. Also I’m not criticizing you, just pointing out a slight difference in opinion. I pirate two dozen games a month
I am going to have to whip out this criticism for anybody that has made these kind of rants.
STOP. FOCUSING. ON. AAA. GAMES!
I'm not kidding, that's your problem and that's anyone else's problem who get sick of gaming as a whole. You keep kicking that can down the street for AAA game development to pander to you, but end up disappointed over and over and over. But you still kept your hand out, you still bought their games at Day 1, you still bought their DLC, you still waited for all and any patchwork. You were still there!
Meanwhile I and several dozen others by now, have been in the pirating game for years before you and anyone else had the guts to finally join in after having your face slapped hundreds of times by this point.
And people have been also telling you for years as to what the better alternatives that was out there were, but nooope! Still stuck to AAA development.
I think you can generalize it even further to don’t reward bad behavior. That should include purchasing goods and services from organizations that try to exploit people or commoditize art.
There’s a scene like this in one of the Telltale Sam and Max games that really deserves a better reenactment. Went something like this:
Sam: “So, Bosco, how much do you want for this…’Deadly virus’ that’s really just a tissue you sneezed into?”
Bosco: “A hundred trillion dollars.”
Max: “WHAT? That’s insane!!”
Sam: “How crazy can you get to think we’re going to pay something like that?”
Bosco: “All I know is, I keep finding the dumbest junk around my store, and think up the most ridiculous price I can imagine for them! And you two keep paying it! So who’s crazy now, fool?”
I started pirating games again when the official version of The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, but a pirated version (which I got just to check if I could get it to work) ran just fine.
Once I figured out how to run that version of the game in Linux (as well as how to sandbox it with Firejail), that knowledge meant I could just as easilly run other pirated versions of games.
Now, generally I’m the ultimated patient gamer (notice how all of that was for The Sims 3, which is from 2009, with its latest DLC being from 2013), but in my Redbeard persona I can just as easilly get recent AAA games as I can any other (probably more easilly, even, as those are the game torrents with the most users).
So I’ve downloaded a number of those, and installed a couple.
And you know what: even the supposedly best ones are BORING. Even highly regarded large open world ones, with their beautifully crafted supposedly alive worlds feel shallow and formulaic in terms of game play and don’t really hold my attention for all that long. I literally have 4 or 5 downloaded recent AAA games waiting to be tried, which I simply can’t be arsed to install because everytime I do try one it just turns out to be dissapointing. I find myself going back to Indie games I’ve played again and again like Project Zomboid or The Lone Dark, or even really old AAA games like The Sims 3 or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (all bought and paid for, BTW).
Even when the only costs are my time and storage space, modern AAA games aren’t worth it over Indie games of older AAA games with far less dazzling graphics.
As I refuse to pirate Indie games, by now I’ve pretty much given up on piracy simply because if you exclude Indie games, all the other games are kinda shit.
Steam is fine, for the most part, but steam is also DRM. Personally I opt to buy games on GoG, because whatever releases there, you can download the installer and play offline, anywhere, anytime, and due to the platform requirements it strips a lot of the extra nonsense of requiring accounts and launchers and such.
The one downside is some publishers/developers don’t have the latest version on there or release on there later as definitive builds, but it’s better than having to deal with all that nonsense to begin with.
Also, I’m more confident that old games will work out of the box from gog than Steam. Unfortunately, as a Linux user, out of the box proton supports on Steam is just too convenient. I can’t think of many gog games that natively run on Linux.
Through Heroic, while there are some exceptions, you get nearly the same out of the box compatibility. And if you don’t get that compatibility and don’t have the patience to troubleshoot, the refund system for GOG is very generous. I just tried The Alters today, which I knew had issues with Proton outside of Steam Deck, and I got it working just before running out of patience and refunding the game.
I don’t have to troubleshoot anything most of the time, and I’ve bought dozens of games through GOG of late, for what it’s worth. And in the case of The Alters, the Steam version has many of the same problems. Just letting you know it’s an option, anyway. You can even route some of your GOG purchase to go toward development of Heroic by buying through the Heroic client, so that it makes sure it only gets better and so that GOG knows how much of their revenue they’re giving up to people who want this sort of functionality.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for over a year now, and most of my games library was on GoG, though I also have a number of games on Steam.
Using Lutris for GoG games, in my experience the rate of “just runs out of the box” games (via Wine) is pretty much the same as for Steam (via Proton), both being somewhere around 9 in 10.
The Steam App basically wrapps the whole Proton, VKDX and so on with automated configuration, including game-specific configuration scripts, and that’s the same as launchers like Lutris and Heroic doing just with Wine instead of Proton, but if you’re trying to use those tools directly without such a launcher its like trying to run Steam games without Steam and just doing all the Proton/VKDX configuration (both general and game-specific) and launching yourself - the old way of running games in Linux from a decade ago which was a complete total PITA.
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