Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can’t even launch many singleplayer games offline
Actively against linux, for some fucking reason
Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one)
Bad store in general compared to steam
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
Epic pros:
Free games
With coupons prices can get VERY low
When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it’s still the case and tbh if it ever was)
Steam pros:
Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it
Generally correct towards the consumer
Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop
During sales prices are good
Steam cons:
Drm
Bad official app Ux and messy ui
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it’s owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)
I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream
Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you’re welcome to do so.
Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that's that's the worst you've got then Valve is must be amazing.
They straight up don’t want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don’t want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you’re doomed. Companies don’t care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don't know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I'm not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I'm going to hate them it's because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There's nothing stopping them from
Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.
But honestly, it's not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don't like the ways that went. I don't like that they killed physical media. I don't like that they killed ownership.
Those things are still happening. It's not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.
And then there's the MTX they're still pushing today. The loot boxes they're selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. It´s all in there right now.
And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I'm even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don't pretend Steam is not doing those things.
I don't hate Steam. But Steam's vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don't particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.
But what does that have to do with comparing it to epic? Epic isnt giving you a physical market, they are taking the next step towards digital ownership loss. Epic took the idea of loot boxes and gave it hyper cancer in fortnite, and uses that hyper cancer cash to fund giving you free games. The list goes on and on. Epics vision is not to undo the damage steam caused, its to worsen the damage to try and push it further.
If this was about the shit trends steam created, sure ok. But all of these problems with steam are things they did in the past establishing themselves, and are things epic is now actively doing to establish itself while taking each one a step further.
If these are problems for steam to have done, then supporting epic over steam is making the exact same mistake again, yes?
I haven't looked at Fortnite in ages, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any loot boxes in it anymore. They first let you preview them before buying and now I think it's all direct purchases for cosmetics and a battlepass. CS2 launched this year and it's still loot boxes all the way down.
So... how does the statute of limitations work now? Is Fortnite now cool with you but CS2 isn't? Or is it more that whatever Epic does is bad and whatever Valve does is good?
EDIT: Also, add "destroying the previous game to replace it with a fake sequel that is really just a patch" to their list of crimes against gaming. They didn't invent that one, because I see you there in the corner, Activision, we haven't forgotten about you, but it sure does suck.
CS2 is just a bad game tbh, but the loot boxes are still the same as they were when they put them in tf2. Fortnite specifically grinds my gears because of the active pointed targeting of kids. I like gambling, I dont mind adults choosing to gamble. I used to play mtg, the actual inventor of loot boxes. But fortnite wants to be the childrens gaming hub, and also sell loot boxes and battle passes. Thats pushing the line past where it was set.
But, like… Again, valve did these things and then set the line. Epic is pushing that line further. If the conversation was “hey why is valve shitty?” you would have a point. But thats not the convo. The conversation is “why is epic worse than valve?” And the answer is valve set shit standards that it holds to, but epic is trying to take those standards and push them further so it can be valve2, with worse established practices.
Youre saying “well valve made these bad decisions, whats the statute of limitations?” Ok, epic is actively trying to repeat those decisions. Why shouldnt we have learned from history, and not reward them doing the things you wish valve hadnt done?
Or do you prefer we have this same conversation in a decade, about epics decisions in the past tense?
So no, they're not pushing that line further. They were actually relatively early in reacting to regulator pressure by backing off from those. I'm gonna guess because they were caught having poorly designed underage checks and slapped with an exemplary fine, so it's not like they didn't get strong external incentives.
But if your argument is that Epic does it worse on a purely moral standpoint... well, you're objectively wrong and have been for about four years. The more interesting question is why do you not know this?
That's been my point all along. Valve's big win is branding. Their brand is absolute solid gold. They get a crazy amount of free passes no matter what they do. They're not bulletproof against controversy, but they're maybe the closest to that I can think of in the games industry.
Plenty of competitors have been more consumer-friendly than them in specific issues. EA started unconditional refunds when Valve was actively whining about regulators wanting them to do them. Epic backed out from loot boxes while Valve is actively adding them to new games. They are known to be the worst profit sharers, and it gets rougher the smaller a dev is... They're great at features and they do take very compelling stances in specific issues (many of them driven by the lifelong blood feud between Gabe and his former coworkers at Microsoft), but they are disproportionately seen as a league above every other first party regardles of facts.
That the kind of branding work you build a masters around right there. It's nuts.
I’m pissed with ford for single handedle fucking our infrastructure, can’t live without a car now. But anyway things that company’s do 10 years ago or 90 stick around
Technically, Denuvo isn’t DRM, it’s anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It’s closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn’t modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn't received the memo. That's cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn't invent Denuvo either, so we're all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn’t necessary to use, it’s rare, but some games just don’t protect their game with any DRM).
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they're not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes "this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below". I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is... you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
Let’s also not forget that game developers have no choice but to release on steam if they want to have any chance on breaking even since they have that huge of a market share and that Epic challenging that already lead to better deals for developers since Valve hat virtually free reign before
The difference between Steam and Epic is that Steam gets modders who mod their Source games. These mods don’t exist outside of Valve games. Valve is paying someone who loves their games and makes content for those games. They are smart in recognizing talent and bringing it to their development teams.
Epic finds existing games with existing communities and build a wall around it so Epic becomes a gatekeeper to the fun. They stop games from working on other storefronts or pay for “exclusivity” which means stopping people from playing the game.
Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little
You don’t own the games on any digital platform, neither steam, epic or gog. You’re only being sold a license to use it, and the license can be revoked whenever the company feels like it.
Thisbis actually true for most of the physical media back in the day, the only difference is that they didn’t really have a method to revoke the license… But that nice old cardboard box you have in your attic, with the nice shiny plastic disc… You still don’t legally own the software on it.
You are absolutely correct, but it’s a con for Epic too. Your comment makes it out to look like you don’t own your games on Steam, but by omission you make it seem like you do own your games on Epic.
I just want to make it very clear that you don’t own the games on either platform. But also want to mention that even if you buy a good old CD/DVD with the game on, then you still don’t own the game…
It’s absolutely awful that it’s practically impossible to own a game, and it’s even more awful that the platform can take away a game you paid for, let alone that they don’t even have to refund you for it…
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you’ll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.
Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would’ve been unavailable otherwise
The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales
Steam’s, Epic’s, Ubisoft’s, Battle.net’s and whatever-EA’s-thing-is-called-now’s sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?
What tracking does Epic need? “According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don’t come back for a week. What a mystery!”
In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s just not built for efficient use of resources.
Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.
Not a clue sorry. I’m personally not one to go out of my way to set up 2FA even though I know it’s good practice to do so (unless it’s work related, then I do)
Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.
Steam pros:
Also:
Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.
Steam cons:
Drm
Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.
If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games
Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.
To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.
I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Epic does, and how many of the ones Epic has are exclusives that don’t count?
Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here’s an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it’s more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.
yea, they steam has some drm-free games available... but steam is a drm platform.. one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying 'purchases' to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origin does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origina does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.
Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I’ve yet to find an indie that can’t be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.
The only singleplayer game I can’t play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.
In Grotto, you play the role of a soothsayer living in a cave who is occasionally visited by members of a tribal society living nearby. They come to you with problems, and they want you to present your opinion, but you can’t speak. You have access to constellations of stars, which each hold different meanings, and you must present your answers in the form of a single constellation, which the petitioners are left to interpret.
You’ll feel a bit of frustration as your intended message is missed completely in favor of something that the petitioner wanted to hear, and the same constellation might mean different things to different people, but that’s just part of the game. The story unfolds around you and its progression is communicated to you only through the explanations your petitioners give for their visit. Each is a uniquely unreliable narrator, so what you believe is for you to decide.
Two endings, and an interesting story with some occasionally unexpected consequences that might make you feel bad, so if a game giving you a case of the sads is unappealing, maybe take that into consideration.
Built to showcase their specific VR hardware. That they built after getting burned from multiple VR companies who abused Valves good will of providing access to their patent protected VR tech for free, to help accelerate the VR industry.
They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We're in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.
Accurate but also not. PewDiePie came out in favour and PirateSoftware lied about it. But I think Thor lying created a huge burst of coverage about how he’s wrong and really created lots of noise about it.
We had a silly mod for Unreal Tournament back in the day for LAN parties that switched out the headshot theme for crotch shots. Whoever did the voice was spot on with the game’s announcer.
Valve are well within their rights here. This isn’t new content or transformative. It’s literally trying to remake the same game using the same engine. These devs knew they were playing with fire. Never come between GabeN and his hats.
Black Mesa is a remake of a single player game that Valve wasn’t planning on remaking any time soon, more profitable to make it official and take a cut
TF2 actively still makes them sht tons of money, no profit in splitting the fan base
Imo, Trademark. Black Mesa is a concept from Half-Life, but “Black Mesa” to the best of my knowledge wasn’t a registered trademark. “Team Fortress/Team Fortress 2” are registered trademarks however, and that significantly changes the value and functionality of the specific terms.
Yes, but it’s easier to give permission to use concepts that don’t infringe on trademark than it is to give permission on something that could be argued in court as muddying a trademark.
I know they require permission either way, but what permission they’re actually asking for changes based on what terminology they use
Well my point is that since the content is directly related, it actually doesn’t matter what they called it. It would’ve been exactly the same amount of infringement if they called it, “happy fun times at the science lab”.
The only differnce is it would’ve been less obvious to identify.
I get your point, my point is the infringement would be less egregious without trademark and thus easier for Valve to turn a blind eye to, or even potentially officially endorse via some potential deal à la Black Mesa.
But hey, I am fully willing to concede that I am just a layman with enormous distance from this topic and no specific expertise or insider knowledge, so the possibility of me being wrong is high
My thinking is that it was hot garbage that was trying to milk the TF2 name to grow their own fanbase. And valve didn’t want to be associated with that.
My guess is that Black Mesa looks great, had passionate people who were really communicating and engaging with Valve/community, didn’t infringe on the Half-Life trademark and it felt like a step forward, which is why it was allowed to continue AND even be brought to market.
Unfortunately it’s not just well within their rights, it’s their legal obligation. The stupid situation that is America means that for them to be able to maintain their claim of ownership on the IP trademark, they have to both actively use the trademark and actively police unauthorized use of the trademark by others. If they don’t, they risk losing the right to claim the trademark, which wouldn’t just mean independents running servers for the game, but also would mean unscrupulous entities could produce and sell merchandise featuring the trademark en masse without having to seek permission from or pay any commissions to Valve.
It’s shitty, but it’s more shitty because of the stupid system we’ve built than because of any intentional malevolence on Valve’s part, imo.
Important caveat: I am not a legal professional and it is entirely possible my understanding of trademark law is flawed, but this is my earnest understanding of the situation.
It is hardly incumbent on copyright owners, however, to challenge each and every actionable infringement. And there is nothing untoward about waiting to see whether an infringer’s exploitation undercuts the value of the copyrighted work, has no effect on the original work, or even complements it. Fan sites prompted by a book or film, for example, may benefit the copyright owner. See Wu, Tolerated Use, 31 Colum. J. L. & Arts 617, 619–620 (2008).
There’s a chance many of the signatures for the EU petition aren’t real. Keep signing to build up a safety margin. Official suggestions are: 10% more minimum, 20% pretty OK, up to 40% more for an actual safety net.
Some countries had problems with signing using the digital ID system - suggests to use the manual method (instructions on the campaign page) or try again later.
Someone not related with the campaign released a SKG crypto. Don’t touch it, obviously.
Ross heard about people harassing Pirate Software, asks to stop.
He’s got a lot of messages to reply to, prioritises ones important to the campaign for now.
UK petition cleared 100k signatures. Number is most likely more reliable than the EU one.
I tried five times to sign using digital ID system, five times failed. Tried once on my phone and…it worked. So try to check other medium if you’re having problem.
Microsoft is literally killing off game studios and dev jobs to fund AI. There’s absolutely no way that customers don’t get fucked when the end goal of game pass is met. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Plus, since SKG is a trending topic, you think they’ll think twice about killing games exclusively under GP or just dropping them? You’re not even paying for the games, just access. I got it a couple times when it was $1. After it went up I realised “oh cool so my entire library would be hostage for future price hikes”. Fuck that.
Stop Killing Games, in short it’s a campaign that’s pushing petitions to force developers to keep games playable when currently if a developer is done with it they will just shut servers and there can be o way to play the games any more, or provide code for someone else to be able to set up a way for them to still be played.
Fawkes is doing this. An indie studio, Buying out IPs that have shutdown their service. They re-released Defiance back in April and it’s been a huge success.
I used to work for a company that Epic Games outsourced their support to. We were based in Athens, Greece. There were other companies receiving the same email pool on Helpdesk Bulgaria or Romania, as well as an Indian office, all supporting US customers via email.
We were paid 3.5eu / hour and our performance was micromanaged by counting how many replies we did per hour.
Hence, we had canned responses that we’d copy/paste to save time and maybe achieve a bonus for that month.
Unfortunately we ended up being shit on on reddit on multiple occasions because some poor guy misunderstood the request and a legitimate request would be promptly denied, even though it shouldn’t be. The level of English comprehension varied wildly among us.
All I’m saying is maybe Rockstar actually has a way to ID your account based on IP addresses, credit card used, date purchased if you have the receipt email, driver’s license etc and you’re just dealing with an underpaid dude in Eastern Europe not quite understanding you.
Usually if you threaten to sue they escalate to tier 2, so you may have more luck that way and tbh I don’t know about Rockstar, that’s how Epic did it back in 2018.
Maybe try explaining it a different way? I dunno but good luck.
Edit: I just saw the rest of the messages in your comment.
I wouldn’t have given you back the account either in their shoes. You just claim things that anyone could claim from their point of view, they have procedures they need to follow.
They can’t try your password, or see it anywhere and would never ask you for it either.
They’re asking simple things that you should have been able to verify. After that they’d likely ask for IP addresses and last 4 digits of card used etc.
They have to do this, or anyone’s account could be hacked by social engineering all too easy.
For all we know, it’s a 50/50 that the customer service guy receives back an email back from that email that supposedly is not accessible saying “WTF I have no idea what you’re talking about, was my account hacked?”
But since you’re that gullible - hey bro, that wallet in your back pocket is mine, I put it there when I washed my jeans. Hand it back now, I paid for it and I’m 100% entitled to it!!
It is valid for them to make sure accounts cannot be taken over by hostile actors, and it is valid for them to assume that you are able to notify them about email address changes in time.
Tell me, how many years did you have to resolve the situation regarding your email address before it came to this?
No and it is shitty to implement this new authentication system after all these years, however should they just hand over any account to some rando writing an angry email? If that were the case, we’d be reading about that right now (“Rockstar gave my account away!”) instead of this.
Edit: I just saw the rest of the messages in your comment.
I wouldn't have given you back the account either in their shoes. You just claim things that anyone could claim from their point of view, they have procedures they need to follow.
They can't try your password, or see it anywhere and would never ask you for it either.
They're asking simple things that you should have been able to verify. After that they'd likely ask for IP addresses and last 4 digits of card used etc.
They have to do this, or anyone's account could be hacked by social engineering all too easy.
I honestly don't see how you can turn the blame on him. It's not his fault the support didn't ask for the right things. It's actually part of Rockstar support procedure to ask essentially public information like previous email addresses or previous nicknames. On my first try they asked the same things from me. On my second try they also asked for Steam purchase history and game keys. It's not his fault the support fucked up and didn't ask for the right things.
The thing is, and I think you’re missing this, he got those wrong. After being asked for email and Nickname he provides them and the support person says “I’m unable to verify that you own the account”, that means he answered wrong, yes those might be bad questions because some random person might know them, but he didn’t.
They will say "I'm unable to verify that you own the account" even if you give the correct answers to those questions. I know that because it literally happened to me.
But this whole situation started with him ignoring that he didn't have access to the mail address connected to his account, and i bet that this has been this way for years, not a few days. And he couldn't even spit out one definite answer for the original nickname used when creating the account (which tells me it definitely has been years). They didn't ask for the wrong things, OP couldn't answer them.
The whole situation started because he was forced to make a separate account when he really didn't need one. He wouldn't have to remember any of those things if Rockstar simply let him play their games.
As for the rest, I guess all I can say is I hope it happens to you because you clearly lack the empathy to understand why this is a problem so they only way for you to understand is by having to go through it yourself.
This doesn't happen to me because i made the mistake of not taking stuff like account creation seriously 20 years ago and i learnt my lesson, OP will have learnt his now. Since you seem to share the notion that it's not important if you lose access to an account which active software is bound to, WITH NO OTHER REAL WAY TO PROVE THAT YOU OWN THAT SPECIFIC LICENSE (you can't even be sure from Rockstar's side that the Steam account hasn't been hacked and now the criminal wants to get the GTA credentials, and Rockstar does not have an ID stored to compare OP's to), you will probably learn it too sooner or later.
That the support asked him for the original username (that's something they HAVE stored and is bound to the owner, because it was defined at account creation) to confirm his ownership (on a pretty weak basis i might add), is the way Rockstar wants to remedy those situations unbureaucratically. But OP can't give them an straight answer because he has ignored the situation for so long that he can't remember that info anymore.
The legal office of any Corp worth their salt forbids the (outsourced, but where it's inhouse the rule is the same tbh) support to login into user accounts, because that's one way to be in real trouble if your support takes over user accounts and pulls shady shit with them.
The Crew name is public information, so it's of no use to them, and sending your password in cleartext per email is either a sign of being mentally unwell or you don't care because you got it from a hack somewhere. If I were the support here, i would suspect someone other than the owner of the account wants to take over the account (no definite answer to my questions and infobombing are social engineering tactics), and go into high alert mode, which happened here.
I don't defend 3rd-Party launchers, those are unneeded trash. But as a veteran support, I have to defend them - they are not responsible for picking up OPs slack that hasn't been cleaned up for years.
But as a veteran support, I have to defend them - they are not responsible for picking up OPs slack that hasn't been cleaned up for years.
There's nothing wrong with defending the support, doesn't mean you need to blame OP. Support has to deal with this shit because Rockstar sucks.
Since you seem to share the notion that it's not important if you lose access to an account which active software is bound to, WITH NO OTHER REAL WAY TO PROVE THAT YOU OWN THAT SPECIFIC LICENSE (you can't even be sure from Rockstar's side that the Steam account hasn't been hacked and now the criminal wants to get the GTA credentials, and Rockstar does not have an ID stored to compare OP's to), you will probably learn it too sooner or later.
Which they wouldn't have to do IF THEY DIDN'T REQUIRE AN ACCOUNT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Also do you even realize what you're saying? You're pretty much saying OP shouldn't have bought any of the rockstar games to begin with because (if we exclude Steam) THERE IS LITERALLY NO WAY TO PROVE THAT YOU OWN THE LICENSE. When social club rolled around there wasn't even a store there, the only way to buy the game was through a third party store like Steam. That said, they will still verify against licenses bought on Steam but I'll get to that.
That the support asked him for the original username (that's something they HAVE stored and is bound to the owner, because it was defined at account creation) to confirm his ownership (on a pretty weak basis i might add), is the way Rockstar wants to remedy those situations unbureaucratically. But OP can't give them an straight answer because he has ignored the situation for so long that he can't remember that info anymore.
And that weak basis can get you nowhere because that happened to me. They asked the same things and when I gave them that information (which, before you start speaking stupid, was correct information) they closed the ticket but didn't return my account. I'm pretty sure they store game keys with the account and then verify using the time of purchase and the key, because that's what they asked the second time around and then I got my account unlocked. AFAIK support did the same thing OP and I think for that support should get shit because why are you asking for useless information when you could ask for useful information?
The legal office of any Corp worth their salt forbids the (outsourced, but where it's inhouse the rule is the same tbh) support to login into user accounts, because that's one way to be in real trouble if your support takes over user accounts and pulls shady shit with them.
Now you're talking about a different thing. OP shouldn't have given them their password because support can't use it. That's on OP. But that doesn't invalidate what I've been talking about.
The Crew name is public information, so it's of no use to them, and sending your password in cleartext per email is either a sign of being mentally unwell or you don't care because you got it from a hack somewhere. If I were the support here, i would suspect someone other than the owner of the account wants to take over the account (no definite answer to my questions and infobombing are social engineering tactics), and go into high alert mode, which happened here.
And OP here is on attempt 3 trying to fix something they shouldn't have to fix in the first place. I can imagine OP is already frustrated beyond belief. Of course he's going to look unhinged, but maybe he wouldn't be in that situation if support had actually tried to help him the first time around. Or better yet, if he wasn't put in this situation to begin with.
I get wanting to defend support but support is not to blame (except for the poor procedure where they don't ask the correct information) and OP is not to blame (for forgetting to update an account they most likely haven't directly used for year, because for the longest time once the account was made it would be linked to Steam and it would never show itself). If there's anyone to blame for this hole mess it's Rockstar for putting in the stupid third party launcher in the first place.
I simply repeat: it is OPs job to keep their accounts in order and contact information updated. The license is bound to an email account. Keep your info updated for stuff you actively use, or run into trouble. There's nothing else to say in this matter.
I simply repeat: it is OPs job to keep their accounts in order and contact information updated.
I don't defend 3rd-Party launchers, those are unneeded trash.
Clearly both of those statements can't be true because the only reason he needs to keep his accounts in order is because the unneeded trash of a third party launcher requires it, so which is it?
Actually, it doesn't matter. This discussion has already shown that you'd rather be a corporate cuck than stand with the consumers.
If it comes to keeping contact information in order, that is something that only consumers can do; it would be pretty creepy if Corpos knew my new email address without telling them.
It has nothing to do with what i think about 3rd party launchers. Those are 2 different things, no need to get personal.
If there was no Rockstar launcher OP wouldn't be having this issue now would he? I'm not saying Rockstar should magically keep the information correct, I'm saying Rockstar shouldn't need this information in the first place. Their launcher shouldn't exist in the first place. I guess it's impossible for you to imagine a world without useless launchers.
Yes! As a die hard Grim Dawn fan I can say Last Epoch is awesome. Grim Dawn is still better imho, but Last Epoch comes close. Both are excellent games one could easily put 100+ hours in and have a blast.
I just wish that I could start at a higher difficulty on Grim Dawn with the appropriate scaling. I don’t want to do the campaign 3 times just like old days.
Didn’t they just change the game with the last patch (still being updated, my God the devs are GOATed) so they you can play to 100 in any difficulty? I still imagine you get pasted in elite and ultimate if that’s your issue though.
Path of exile charges for inventory QoL and with the ludicrous amount of different stuff that drops, it’s arguably kind of mandatory if you’re trying to complete seasonal objectives
For PoE you consider 30gb installed (on PS5 mind you) a large file size? Yes it has mtx, but it is not once pushed or advertised to you, and none of it is required for anything. They does improve the QoL of the game however.
CoD + WZ is around 240gb I think. Most modern AAA games are usually 90gb minimum.
Some years ago they pretty much rewrote the entire base game code (or some parts of it) and tidied it up, reducing the overall size. It may be larger installed on PC (I’m on PS5) but I can’t imagine there being too much of a difference.
The MTX for PoE are within the “nice” ones. There’s extra stash tabs, but you don’t need to consider that until after the campaign. And then there’s cosmetics. No pay to win. And the MTX are on your account, so they will be on PoE2 as well.
Since this is caused by activist pressure on the payment processors, perhaps a grassroots activist campaign of our own could change their mind. Especially if we threaten to stop using their services in favor of any competitor that allows all legal purchases.
Hopefully you’re referring to Visa/Paypal, not Itch.
One place that comes to mind is Verotel. I barely know them, but supposedly one of their star attributes is their use for adult businesses. Likely someone else knows them better.
visa have similar restrictions… the issue is that payment processor, merchant, card network, issuing bank, and acquiring bank (and a few more) are all different layers to facilitating a transaction… there are very few card networks in the world, and essentially people pay online using mostly either just visa or mastercard
technically you could probably run a site that only accepts amex, diners club, jcb, discover, etc but it really wouldn’t go well: people want to whip out their card (often their only method of online payment) and just pay and go
you’d also need to find a payment processor that would be comfortable taking on the risk of facilitating transactions around mastercard and visa… they might just cut them off from access to their network. sounds like extortion? yeah welcome to the world of banking, where in any other industry it’d be called a cartel
making things even more difficult is that by law in the US payment processors must offer at least 3 (i think? it might be 2?) “routes” (these things aren’t always straight forward - sometimes there are multiple card networks involved), so you probably have to have a pretty mature payment processor because they’d have to accept several of the alternative card networks
oh and you have to push various stats to the federal reserve which is a massive back and forth bureaucratic challenge even above the technical challenge of interfacing with some pretty awful systems. it often takes over a year to get things sorted unless you’re a “too big to fail” type customer
there are a buuuuunch of other spanners that get thrown into the works, but i’m not sure where the NDA line hits so i’m gonna just leave it there and say trust me, payment processing (distinct from payment gateway) is an absolute nightmare mess
I’m not sure that works, like on a purely game theory level. If gamers start to apply pressure, threaten to stop buying games, the stores need to make a choice:
A. Risk facing the wrath of the gamers, sales are likely to drop. Possibly by a lot, perhaps 15-20%. That could keep up for months before stabilizing.
B. Risk facing the wrath of the payment processors, credit card sales will stop immediately, only alternative payment types get through. Sales drop by 80% overnight, over time some users will seek alternative payment methods, possibly resulting in only 50% less revenue than expected…
While both of those options are bad, one of them is totally fatal to their business.
Those numbers are of course only speculation, but that’s my best guess.
I find it offensive that the only effective way to combat this is to fight fire with fire and also make a big bitchy noise about this like the conservatives love to do. I have better things I would rather be doing with my life. But such are the times we live in I suppose.
In the short term, I think that collectively being Karens about it would be able to reverse the pressure, by steering the monopolists away from oppressing us. Because they are mainly motivated by money.
It absolutely is. We only encourage gun and violence culture in real life, especially by authoritarian figures and their representatives. Allowing such in virtual spaces where no one can actually be hurt or killed runs counter to our patriotic ideals.
It’s already expanded. It started as going after “rape and incest” but now it’s all adult games. But a bunch of lgbtq games have already gotten hit. I am beyond furious.
i don’t know if any source has caught up yet, but a few days ago it was indeed just taboo kink games that were being targeted, now it seems all of itch.ios NSFW games are disappearing
I think all games being hit is a temporary measure while they get some sort of new process in place. We’ll see where things land.
Either way, card processing companies shouldn’t be dictating what kind of art consumers can consume, even if I don’t personally agree with the content of some of the worst offenders. If it’s not outright illegal, they can fuck off.
Direct link to the game because the creator restricted who can view their posts on Bsky. Only viewable via a link or from their profile now, searching the name only returns a bunch of other dress-up games, but not this one, presumably because of the „Transgender“ tag.
It’s gonna stop once they hit a category that includes big AAA games. Once they start cutting into the revenue of Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed the big developers should take a stance.
Capitalism is a global problem, its not contained to america. Replace neighbors being kidnapped with which ever country you’re in supporting a genocide and it still fits, and is likely accurate unless you’re like in Yemen.
Oh no I no longer can play the incredibly toxic matchmaking multi-player games and instead have to enjoy the automation, exploration, story, management and strategy games I’ve always loved
Hmm should I try different party combos in BG3 to see how the dialogue changes or run around a COD map getting shot in the back of the head every 9 seconds while ads for mtx strobe flash my corneas?
Feel kind of lucky. They weren’t so toxic when I was good. The only place to really find that was from the notorious Xbox Live kids experimenting with their first ever swear words.
It was when gaming reached a broader audience and wasn’t just for “nerds” that toxicity became commonplace. Went from making friends with strangers all the time to just default muting mics and avoiding communities.
Nowadays, the less reflex-deoendent, the more you’ll be surrounded by players from those days and the less toxicity. Compare HLL to MW, for example.
As always, the closer a game gets to being a full blown simulator, the older the playerbase tends to be.
Almost like arcady bs with autoaim and automatchmaking and very short game round times and superhuman movement capabilities appeal to people with poor impulse control.
… of course you can then go way, way too far into fullblown sim territory and end up with actual geriatrics and/or turboautists, lol.
(I say this lovingly as a turboautist who has spent probably an unhealthy amount of time in various niche sim communities, lol)
Kind of. Growing up playing Counter-Strike and Battlefield titles, toxicity was still a much rarer thing than these days. Hell, smacktalk wasn’t even a thing unless playing with friends and joking around.
Hrm, I encountered plenty of toxic assholes back on CS and BF/42/Vietnam/2, to the point that I had to explicitly seek out better communities, and then landed at Project Reality, being an alpha/beta tester / gameplay design concept discussion enthusiast (lol) with them for years.
Maybe I just had worse luck back then, or maybe its just way, way worse now with modern casual shooters.
Could be a bit of both.
…
I still remember the final test before PR 0.5 was released.
DBzao had written the first iteration of the injected python script that was to govern how you could request which kits depending on which squad you were in, who had what kits in your squad, how many kits were available to your whole team, etc.
Problem was… sometimes, for a completely indiscernible reason… some players just couldn’t use the system at all.
We spent 3 hours in TS … or maybe it was Ventrilo?.. we spent hours trying everything we could think of, could not identify any pattern.
As the session was being wound down, as we had basically given up… I had a realization.
I pulled up the in game scoreboard… many times.
I then started barking orders at various remaining players to see who could and could not use the kit system.
If a non alphanumeric character was in your username, you could not use the kit system.
DBzao didn’t believe this at first, pulled up his code, and then screamed.
… yep, he hadn’t properly handled strings or string conversions or special characters at some stage of the code.
We’d been stuck on this for almost 2 weeks, and 6 hours later, it was fixed and released.
The controls and game mechanics tend to be so complicated that… well, people tend to have more realistic expectations from their teammates, and if you find a decent community, people tend to be more mature and friendly.
It actually requires a part time job level of commitment to be an exceptional shooter or tanker or pilot or even medic if you’re playing with a sufficiently complex health simulation… so, somewhat true to life, people tend to specialize and thus have much, much more incentive for decent communication standards.
Downside: Also true to life, a lot of games will end up feeling like 90% camping/hiking/road trip, punctuated, often essentially randomly, by 10% sheer terror.
…
You are not authorized for retirement unless you want a dishonorable discharge, soldier! If you need a wrist splint and vertical ergonomic mouse to continue your duties, check the nearest supply depot! Dismissed!
Those are pretty much the most commonly played milsims, with tons of available mods and dlc, huge expansive maps, players have their own inventories, can customize your whole load out and such…
SQUAD is sort of a milsim lite, maybe? It evolved out of Project Reality for Battlefield 2, they eventually made their whole own game in Unreal.
It retains the round based, class base core concept, but greatly expands on the more arcady nature of the Battlefield series with many more realistic gameplay concepts, much of them revolving around playing a role in a squad.
The maps aren’t as big as Arma, but you can still end up with a whole game session taking an hour or two.
There are also other games that basically aim for what SQUAD does, but not in a modern combat setting, Hell Let Loose for WW2 as an example.
I think Gray Zone Warfare is trying to be a new sort of milsim on the block, but so far I’ve heard roughly mixed reviews of it… and there are tons of ‘tactical shooters’… but they tend to be smaller in scope and usually lack vehicles, or don’t include near as many, or simulate them as extensively… and a whole lot of them tend to be developed by basically people who vastly overestimate their ability to make a game, and can be very toxic / in denial about this… so be careful with those, haha, probably check youtube for some reviews before diving in.
There’s also Gunner Heat PC if you want a very tank oriented tank sim, and DCS if you want an excruciatingly detailed, combat oriented flight sim, and you also hate money, lol.
Oh right, for basically most of these, you’re probably going to want to try and find and join some kind of larger community on discord or something like that… usually they’ll have guides, tutorials, plan matches/games on a schedule, maybe even offer some kind of psuedo boot camp / training for enthusiastic noobs, hehe.
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