If something isn’t respecting your values, I’m of the opinion that you make a stronger statement by not even pirating those games. If you’re spending time playing them, you’re also not spending time and money playing some game that was meticulously made to respect your values. You’re fine playing indie games, but you’d play more of them if you gave up playing these AAA games that you decided to pirate. You talk to your friends and on forums about the games you play, which will at some point convince someone else to buy and play them, too. If you want them to hurt, so that they change, don’t even give them the time of day.
That’s right, it’s exactly what I think, you are one way or another helping a game to be known. The same strategy people talked about why Microsoft don’t shut every Office cracker, they want normal people to use it and get used to it, so companies will use it too, eventually, and they can audit some IT companies, charge a hell amount of money if they use pirated software.
I agree with everything, but I’ll still pirate AAA games, just for the experience. I classify publishers/developers companies like this:
Companies it doesn’t even worth playing to avoid indirect marketing: Ubisoft, EA
Companies that at least it worth pirating: Activistion, Rockstar, etc…
Let’s be honest, the games are good, probably made by some people who love what they were doing, but then it was put behind a shitty business model, because developers are just trying to make a living while executives trying to harvest all the money.
I think as the time goes, developers will start making their choices better, leave predatory companies, start or join indie companies, and I, at the same time, will migrate to a more indie focused gaming.
You follow your own moral compass. My feelings are, if I was short on money, I’ve got a backlog and a stream of games being thrown at me for free (legally) such that I’d never have to pirate and never be bored. I’m willing to pay more for a good product, and I so thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 1-3 that I bought the deluxe edition of 4 that was a no-go for you; they’re one of the few AAA devs keeping LAN alive, and that is worth me throwing me money at them to tell them they’re doing it right, on top of just making a very fun game. The companies whose games you’re pirating are the ones that need the attention the least, but every game you could be instead funneling time and money into benefits so much more from each individual sale. Plus, the reason we’ve got so much anti-consumer bullshit in games now is because piracy was a boogeyman for the industry for a long time, so I’d rather not give them any additional data points to make things even worse when we’ve already got an entire era of video game history that disappears when their servers go offline. That’s how I see it anyway.
The times I don’t feel gross about pirating, personally, are when the pirated version is supposedly the better version of the game (like emulating an old console game instead of playing a compromised PC port) or when the game is delisted and no longer available through ordinary channels, like Battlefield 2. You do what feels right to you. Pirating Nintendo games is an option to me, but they bother me as a consumer in all sorts of ways, and I instead spend that time and money on games like The Thaumaturge rather than playing through Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo will be just fine without my sale. The team behind The Thaumaturge may or may not have made enough money to make a second game. If Nintendo was a less shitty company, I’d be buying and playing Metroid Prime 4. Maybe I’ll end up discovering and enjoying something else during that time that needs my dollar more instead.
This entire controversy is from 2020. Spoiler: GOG did not relist the game. Red Candle sold it on their own storefront, and both Steam and GOG retained a tally in the “bends over for CCP” column.
Wait untill people realize that Ross Scott has had a running show, ‘Freeman’s Mind’, going back to basically the fucking machinima days, where he just does a playthrough of all of Half Life and voices Gordon’s inner thoughts.
We are going to need another petition to get Ross an honorary title, a goddamned bust of an upraised fist in an HEV suit, clenching a crowbar, with ‘For Exceptional Valor and Dutiful Service in the Defense of Video Gaming’ emblazoned on its base.
Whats wrong with PirateSoftware? He runs a ferret rescue which doesn’t claim any tax incentives and he teaches people about security and ethics, I’ve never heard of him having beef with anyone.
Yeah he seems pretty positive and helpful, so did his bias mislead him on this one?
Also I wasn’t even sure he was still a huge fan of his former employer—but now that I think of it I guess he was really pleased with his time there, cuz he’s proud of his ban wave strategies and stuff
He tends to be condescending, toxic, and dishonest. I happened to watch this video the other day that covers a fair bit of stuff including the stop killing games petitions, if you’ve got 20 minutes.
completely misrepresenting the stop killing games initiative.
bitching for quite a while that “someone” pulled a mob during a world of warcraft raid causing a wipe, going back to see who it was to remove them, seeing it was himself and then justifying why it was now the right call.
running away from his group in world of warcraft in a fight claiming he has no mana, while he’s wasting moves to drain the last of his mana and he has ways of getting around half of it back. This was during some kind of creater guild thing where if you die you lose your character. So abandoning his team to save himself and lying about it.
banning/blocking everyone who criticizes or corrects him on these things
DMCA’d and threatened legal action on an indie dev for a parody game that included him as a cockroach.
The reason it’s forgotten because most people aren’t able to play it. If valve really did put important story in a game that they knew most gamers would never be able to play that’s kind of shitty
The idea of sinking $500 into a headset and then another $80 for one game is pretty crazy. Not like Valve doesn't have the ownership numbers from the hardware survey. It was never going to sell like HL2.
Given how different it is to other, normal 3d games, I don’t think the comparison is fair. Additionally there are a lot of other, really great games in VR too.
Regardless, I don’t think the problem is financial anymore. Rather that VR requires a sort of “commitment to inconvenience” where you feel cut off from the outside world (among other things) that I don’t think a lot of people are comfortable with.
Are "plenty of people" enough to make a game commercially viable? And not in an indie way.
I zone out, completely cut off from others, while playing games all the time. What I don't want to do is fork over more cash for things that will collect dust (like a headset for a single game).
Given how different it is to other, normal 3D games, I think it's a bit much to stake your franchise on something most people will never have. It's obvious Valve knew that, they're not idiots and have put out good hardware that didn't see mass adoption in the past (Steam Controller, Steam Link, etc.); it's clear they wanted to try out something new even if it wasn't a huge blockbuster. They have lots of revenue from other sources to fall back on.
They probably hoped that some people would take a chance and get the hardware to play the game, and some people did. But to expect that most would do that? Lol. They're not that dumb.
"The idea" was to do something no one had done before with a beloved franchise. Not to sell headsets.
I don’t think they particularly cared if you bought their headset, but they had the premium offering if you were interested. I think they wanted Alyx to be the Mario 64 of VR.
It’s both financial (huge investment for a single game) and not. Playing with a thing strapped to your face does not sound fun. Especially with glasses. Or in the summertime. Plus I’m a Linux gamer, so I’d probably run into a lot of issues before I could run it.
I also run on Linux exclusively and I could play Half-Life Alex almost flawlessy on the Steam Index. And other VR games as well, including Beatsaber, Gorn, Walkabout Golf and many others. I’m really grateful to Valve and their Proton.
I mean it‘s 5 years old now and what has Valve released for VR since? A single game isn‘t gonna make a hardware and they know that. It was a failure in the end of the day.
5 years old now and what has Valve released for VR since?
You know Valve has released a whopping 3 things total in that timespan (didn’t include deadlock cuz I’m not sure that’s officially released yet), right? A free steam deck teaser, the card game they’ve been working on for a while, and the CSGO 2 update
Valve works slow, my guy
A single game isn‘t gonna make a hardware
Good thing there are a shit ton of other games, then
It was a failure in the end of the day
No it wasn’t, you high? They sold out of Indexes around the games launch. Would have sold more if not for COVID, too
Hold on. Why are you replying with unrelated things that Valve did instead of focusing on VR to get people onto that platform? Kind of proves my point, doesn‘t it? Also Covid? Seriously? If anything Covid should‘ve accelerated development on VR games.
Also Covid? Seriously? If anything Covid should‘ve accelerated development on VR games
Your claim was that the game was a failure, my point with COVID was that you would have been extra wrong about that had there not been a pandemic limiting how many headsets they could actually sell, which was the point of the game. In the world that we got they sold out and had Back-orders for a year, had there not been a global pandemic those Back-orders would have been sales, and likely many who couldn’t buy one would have been able to as well
The rest of your comment shows you have 0 idea how Valve works internally. The whole studio doesn’t just work on one project, there are smaller teams that pick and choose what they do. This is why Valve tends to release shit a couple years apart that are wildly different (Alyx and Artefact), but 5-8 years between similar products (Portal 2 and Alyx). It being 5 years or more since their last major VR release is to be expected from them, not a sign of failing at anything
Do you know about gaming consoles? 3D accelerator cards? Graphics cards? Or… CD ROM drives?
People have been buying hardware to play a certain game for literal decades. The games are called “system sellers”. Games so good they sell hardware. It’s usually even the opposite: if your hardware doesn’t have such a game, it doesn’t sell (atari Jaguar anyone?).
VR has the extra element of needing a suitable living space to play in, though. Other games I can do at my desk or in my tiny, cramped living room, but I have nowhere I can easily set up for VR that would allow for significant range of motion.
I own a VR headset, but I only really use it for games that allow you to be stationary and just use the headset as an immersive monitor with a standard controller. As one would expect, it doesn’t get much use, because not many VR games are made to play that way!
Sure, but if people love Half-Life and don’t care about other VR games it sucks that it’s locked behind hardware requirements that even Valve doesn’t give a crap about considering it’s the only VR game they made.
Edit: I’m sure all of you would be pissed if Sony released a new PlayStation with one game from a beloved series and then just said “now it’s in other people’s hands, let them take care of creating more games for our hardware!”
It isn’t up to Valve alone to push forward the industry and release top-tier VR games every other year. They took a risk and created one of the best games I’ve played, and I’m not alone in that opinion. Valve are trying expand the gaming experience, they are trying to be innovative, and people blame them for “not giving a crap”. Say what you want, but I thank Valve for what they are doing.
Most of the common ones now do wireless streaming from the PC for PCVR. But yes, for PCVR games you will still need a PC to run it. There are some VR headsets that are capable of running some games on it without a connected PC, like my Quest 2 can run Superhot or BeatSaber etc.
It’s also way different from the goal of HL2. Downloading a launcher called Steam for free is not the same thing as buying specific hardware to play one game.
The “other reasons” people aren’t buying affordable VR setups is because they don’t trust Meta or their privacy policies. If the new Valve headset was $300-500 it would go a long way. But $1200 isn’t it.
The only other one ove used is psvr1, and one of those smart phone ones, psvr2 is obvioisly miles ahead of bith, though i cant say how it compares to Index, or quest. Id imagine its probably near quest quality.
I’ve used pretty much all of the headsets on the market. I still haven’t tried a Big screen VR headset though :(
For popular headsets I’d rank them kinda like this
Valve Index - it’s just really old and really expensive now, don’t buy one unless you get a hell of a deal on it used
Quest 2 - Still very very good, screens are getting a little dated now
PSVR2 - its a little janky on PC but it works fine and the OLEDs are sublime
Pixmax Crystal - Money not a problem this is the best headset I’ve tried. The FOV is crazy, displays are beautiful, and tracking is damn near perfect. Its just like $2300 for the whole lot
Quest 3 - Overall the best headset on the market. Its $570 (just get the pro strap, trust me) and gets you so close to the big boys in screen quality, plus it’s wireless, plus it has crazy good passthrough (I use it a lot, most people don’t), and streams PC games perfectly.
PSVR2 has really really really good looking displays, but it has some other downsides which really bring it down in the rankings. I’d stay away from it unless you get a deal on a used one, then it would absolutely be worth it.
This assumes people are rational and that what they say they are willing to pay matches what they are actually willing to pay. And that is just the people not trying to abuse the system.
Personally I don’t think I’d advocate for OP’s suggestion, but you could solve the problem by making the suggestion also a commitment for X period of time. If you make the suggestion, and the price drops within 90 days, it automatically purchases it, etc.
You can put in a buy order at 0.1 for a share worth 100. You’re dreaming, but you can still do it. Don’t think it really qualifies as abusing the system.
I’m guilty of this. So many times, I’ll see something at full price and say I’ll wait to buy it on sale. Then it goes on sale and I don’t feel like spending the money at all. Granted, I’m not trying to sway the market and screaming my bid, this is just my internal monologue. I have a backlog of games and a busy adult life, so it’s not like I’m game-poor. Just regular poor.
Terraria, for something crafty-buildy with combat and very cartoony/2d blood and gore. 1-8 players.
Don’t Starve Together, survival crafting in a hand-drawn Tim Burton-esque style. 2-6 players.
Awesomenauts, 3v3 fast paced competitive game in the style of Saturday morning cartoons. 3-6 players.
Deep Rock Galactic, coop shooter where you play space dwarves and shoot bugs while doing missions together. Gore may be a bit strong for your liking, but it’s very stylized and only against bugs and robots. 1-4 players.
Risk of Rain 2, shooter where you try and escape a planet together with lots of different ways to play. 1-4 players.
Age of Empires 2, old school fast-paced medieval strategy game modernized with new graphics and such. 1-8 players.
Valheim, viking survival crafty buildy game in which you explore and conquer a dangerous world together. 1-10 players.
Cassette Beasts, technically not multi-player yet but they’re adding it as a free update January. It’s a Pokémon-esque game where you’ll all be trainers in the same overworld together capturing beasts and taking down challenges together. 1-8 players when it comes out.
All of these games are rated T for teen, but it sounds more like you’re opposed to M rated violence and language than T levels. They’re all also insular in that this friend group doesn’t need to involve other people to play together and can either play with or against each other or the computer.
I just want to avoid the porn games on steam, and any super-gory shit like dead space. I thought Diablo would be fun for him but it is a bit too much right now. It was different when super pixelated back in the D2 days.
Overcooked can make for some fun chaos, though it tops at 4 players. Team Fortress 2 could work, but it does have graphic violence and I dunno if it’s available for the newer xboxes. On PC, it has loads of mods and custom maps that offer similar experiences to what you can find in Roblox
The OP said that the friend group has Xboxes, and I assume that you can’t mod the games. I may be wrong though, I haven’t used an Xbox since the 360 and mostly game with the pc myself.
Yeah, to stop another CrowdStrike, but it’s not a sure thing, yet there’s talk of api’s etc and wouldn’t surprise me if certain companies got a pass. An article covering your point: theverge.com/…/microsoft-windows-kernel-antivirus…
Nope. They’re developing an alternative set of APIs for userspace in conjunction with security vendors for their products to use but it’s all still a long way off and will be optional to start with.
Given the volume of mission-critical devices security products are installed on (which the CrowdStrike fuckup highlighted), getting them out of kernel space would be a huge risk reduction for the world. And security vendors would love to get away from that risk as pulling a CrowdStrike costs a lot of money setting things right with customers.
But an anticheat used by consumers on their personal devices for a game, not such a big deal.
While I’m sure MS will eventually deprecate and then kill off third party kernel drivers, it could take a decade since MS has so much business (both internal and within their customer base) that relies on legacy crap.
I have a feeling you’re right about this. I do wish Microsoft would take the Apple approach as Apple steamed ahead with deprecating kernel-mode access.
Love them or hate them, Apple take security a lot more seriously than Microsoft these days and it’s a real shame MS see security architecture as a nuisance rather than a core responsibility of their business.
it’s a real shame MS see security architecture as a nuisance rather than a core responsibility of their business.
I’m pretty sure the reason behind this is that they treat backwards compatibility as a higher priority in a lot of cases. There are so many odd choices I see in my day to day that I can only explain away by backwards compatibility. It’s part of the reason you see them take forever to depreciate old and insecure protocols until they get an encouragement from a vuln hitting the news.
That’s what I’ve noticed as well. They keep the old stuff around for as long as they can, because some software made 30years ago is critical to our society so they need to support it or we’re doomed
And it’s not like the companies will update old stuff, either. They’ve shown a willingness to forget about old games as soon as the revenue dips too much. The result will be that those games will be unplayable in the future.
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?
For those who don’t know, this streamer is only tangentially related to the stop killing games petition because he made a comment about it being BS because he misinterpreted what it was supposed to do. He used his misinterpretation to spread false information about this petition leading to it not getting the support it initially should have.
When the guy behind the petition made a statement saying he didn’t think the petition was going to get enough signatures in part because of the misinformation being spread about it, PirateSoftware doubled down on his false claims and all of this lead to people doing the research they should have done in the first place and deciding to support the petition after all.
What we should probably be learning from this is that we should do our own research, and find out things instead of taking the word of random people online.
Edit: electric has brought to my attention that it wasn’t just one clip, but in fact a whole video dedicated to spreading misinformation that was made by Thor from PirateSoftware. Just wanted to be clear about that.
A comment? Am I misreading your comment or is this just ignorance of the situation? Because PirateSoftware made a whole ass video on the subject way back (the one allegedly rife with misinformation). I remember it on my feed when the campaign was getting traction, but didn’t watch it because my view of him was souring.
From what clips I’ve seen*, PirateSoftware misinterprets the majority of what he addressed. Either maliciously or unknowingly, which is why he was blamed for tanking momentum since that video did get a ton of views (before people wised up to him being a total cunt).
*Yes I know the irony of what I just said there after reading your last paragraph. I believe these terminally online streamers because I would not put it past PirateSoftware to be this awful after watching his videos for a small period and then the subsequent controversies coming out.
He may well have done but the only clip I have seen is the one where someone asks about it while he’s streaming games and he responded to that person with misinformation.
Ah. Makes sense. I caught a stream once and he pretty much just did discussions with the chat. A lot of his videos were just cuts from his streams when someone asked.
I think a lot of people didn’t hear about this guy until about 2 days ago. Personally I didn’t even know about this petition.
I knew about the lawsuit against The Crew, but I didn’t know anything about any more general petition, so I think the greater problem was simply a lack of advertising.
System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam’s case, it’s opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.
Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they’ve been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the “development support” they received as anyone.
Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
I didn’t know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
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