I agree with this opinion: prices should not have changed, but a proof of national identification and restricting it to one account might have been sufficient to avoid VPN access.
The problem I see is that some people were taking advantage of the low prices with a VPN and an Argentinian/Turkish account, and assigning their parent account as a family member to share games. I think limiting their regions would’ve been more effective than just hiking up the prices.
I would like to add Outer Wilds to this. No combat, virtually no violence, and adult themes are aimed at mild existentialism. Great exploration game with fun physics and puzzles.
For older kids I'd suggest: Satisfactory. Essentially first person Factorio with mild combat vs fauna.
Astroneer: exploration and advancement.
The DLC, definitely. The thorny planet is in the OG game a little bit. For the DLC I turned off scares because I don't really play horror games and it was still very fun.
Exactly! This is more about the social aspect of these games. Kids are playing Fortnite/Roblox/Minecraft because that’s where their friends are hanging out after school.
The top DDG search result for that (on crazygames . com) looks like a rip-off or something. I’m going to assume the thing you mean to recommend is MineClone2, a mod for MineTest, which is the most prominent Free Software Minecraft-style game.
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Not the Skywalker Saga)
Clone Wars is also really good, plus it has a lot better split screen which is great for 2p coop playing with your kid/nephew/niece or just being able to have 2 children play together instead of fighting over who gets to play and who has to wait for their turn that never comes
I never played the DLCs or the Shovel Knight adjacent games they made (think there was a puzzler?) but I loved the original when it came out. Might be time to dive back in to that world.
I only played the original. I had a super shitty laptop that I loved back in the day when I was working the ambulance. Would play it between calls. As well as a special LoL account that would occasionally go afk dying matches. (Sorry guys. Not my fault. Kind of my fault. I’m sorry.
Better idea: Get them a ton of classics from the Steam sale, put them on a fresh acct, and then give them hundreds of hours of good shit for like $50. You could get 5 copies of Undertale for the equivalent price of 1 Fortnite skin.
Strictly speaking, I’m not opposed to monetization in f2p games but the pricing is egregious.
When the le seraffim bundle for overwatch 2 dropped they also put their in game currency on sale so you could get enough currency to get the bundle for $50 instead of $70 and people were calling it a great value.
Even at $50, that’s enough for 4 months of humble choice which would net you 32 games and 6-8 of them would be AAA games.
I share my steam linrary with my two kids. Gave them 200+ games. They still play Fortnite and Roblox because that is what their friends play. When I was young the biggest games were single player and you shared stories with your friends. Now you play with them online.
It really is crazy how much the cultural landscape of games has evolved over the past decade or so. I’ll just be here playing classic singleplayer games until I’m old and gray like a boomer lol.
Ha! I guess I already qualify as a boomer. I’m 43 and been a gamer since the commodore days. I play everything that comes my way if time permits, from indies like islanders for a relaxing me time, to mega AAA F2P monsters like Fortnite to have a laugh with my sons.
I only play one online game (Dead By Daylight). Besides that it’s all single player games (mostly JRPGs). This year: Secret of Mana, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Torna The Golden Country, and Tears of the Kingdom. It was a good year. About to start Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
For sure there are alternatives, but I doubt there’s a lot of overlap between kids who want books and kids who want some e-currency. Probably not much overlap with gift givers either.
I'm still heartbroken that Matchland was killed off. It was a really cool turn based match 3 strategy game that involved powering up warriors by connecting tiles for 15 to 30 seconds.
The cool bit was that you could go diagonally too and all the shapes you drew would fire off at once once the timer to draw them was up, so you could get all these huge combos on the board at once if you planned your turn right.
They even killed the cartoon network clone they released of the game too. I really miss them both, it was a really fun well designed game with cute art and music.
I miss zenonzard personally, a card game that wasn’t a straight mtg clone (or worse) or stupidly simple (fuck hearthstone, all my homies hate hearthstone). All the good games die while fucking candy crush lives on.
It never in any way implies that it's transferable or applies to other games.
Right, but the lawsuit is over the fact that it never says otherwise either. Pay to win is neither here nor there. It could be just for cosmetics, and the suit still stands. To be clear, I'm not a lawyer, and I've never played any of the games this is in reference to. Pay to win just doesn't seem to be a part of this at all.
I got into it a few years back and nearly finished ARR. I found the storyline and cut scenes really engaging, and felt like I was a part of something. But I tried to pick it up and start fresh about a year ago and the bastards oversimplified my class (Summoner), and I swear they even further nerfed the low-mid level difficulty, making me feel most days as though I was playing on creative mode. For those who don’t care, though, the storyline, world and music (holy fuck, Limsa at night and Ul’dah at night are absolutely soul stirring) are really something special.
I will likely try the game again with the upcoming graphical upgrade, but I fear I will always feel too behind on the story and won’t be a part of the entirely new storyline/age that is slated to begin with the next expansion. That graphical upgrade will be huge, though. I play a ton of old games myself, but sometimes FFXIV feels like it’s running modern character models over PS2 environments and grass textures. It deserves to cast off some of that jank and show how beautiful it’s natural world can be.
Unchecked “free market” capitalism, if I had to guess.
Companies should never have been able to run outside of a very tight yoke. Yeah sure, capitalism. But not unchecked and especially not unchecked-across-borders so they can start escaping shit by moving legal entities around. Oh and speaking of that, maybe “corporations as entities” is another really really big one we fucked up, allowing the people who make the truly shitty decisions to shirk responsibility for them.
TL;DR: the way it was supposed to work is that entities that wanted limited liability were granted corporate charters in exchange for providing some large, tangible public benefit (and very much not just “shareholder value”, BTW). This post-Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. world where corporations are essentially mandated to be sociopathic is an absolute 100% perversion of what incorporation was meant to be for!
In case you are wondering this because it seems children actually prefer subscriptions to owning games, they don’t. Out of what is offered to them, the most desired choices happen to be subscription models of some form. If those games were something you just bought then the desire would be for games that were purchased in full.
This type of games are free to play. So a bunch of kids who are friends can start playing at any time even without money. If some of them like the game, they’ll stay as a group for the social aspect.
I don’t see any wrong in it. Its just different of what I did 30 years ago.
I’m gonna have to disagree. As somebody who was an Overwatch addict, these games are designed to effectively be like drugs. They are not meant for children and shouldn’t be purported as such.
These are casinos playing in simple.
In fact, it’s much less incentivized for a game that is one and done, even multiplayer titles if they are a paid game.
Not teaching kids thr value of money imo is the main one. They dont understand the cost of subs because its not their money they are spending.
I have a half brother whose on the sensible side of buying games. He doesnt get a lot of money, hell he got a 20$ steam card from a friend, and hes saving it for an indie game that doesnt even release till 2025.
Evil genius marketing, working as it always does. The kids don’t know any better, so they are being exploited and conditioned to think the horrible new normal is just the way things have to be. And most parents are too tired and busy to find better alternatives.
It’s simple, the games that appeal the most to kids require some form of subscription. If those games didn’t, then they wouldn’t want ones with subscriptions.
Putting it like that makes it sound that this is incidental, but the conditioning techniques baked into the design of these games are included for the sake of selling battle passes and virtual items. If they didn’t have subscriptions and virtual currency, they would have been built entirely differently.
That’s because I am not speaking on the corporate point of view here, I am discussing the kids’. Every time I see this subject come up there seems to always be people who think that the move to subscriptions are due to a preference of access model upon the consumer, naively ruining their own capacity to own things, namely kids/young people, thinking it’s just the modern, and thus better, more convenient, way to go.
Even the article’s headline is written in a manner that suggests that kids prefer the subscription model it’s self, not that they are choosing based on the game without thought to the access model.
I see what you mean. Far from me to want to blame the kids for it, but I don’t think we can just overlook how corporations are deliberately funneling them towards these models through marketing and manipulative design. The kids’ perspective is one of just being excited for things they want in these games, but this happens due to habitual conditioning of a neverending threadmill of virtual rewards and Fear of Missing Out. Not to mention semi-organic peer pressure among kids, over who has the fanciest or default cosmetics. Which wasn’t deliberately created by the corporations, but they are definitely benefitting over it, and nobody is dissuading that from happening.
The kids are not at fault, but I don’t think this is a “just let kids be kids” situation. They are being exploited.
It did. I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying, or adding more to it than there is.
Children do not desire subscriptions as a superior model to owning games. The model of access is not something they are comparing and contrasting. They are simply going for the games they prefer, which get locked behind subscriptions. I never implied that games popular with kids aren’t intentionally put behind subscriptions, I was arguing that the subscription model isn’t actually preferred by kids.
How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.
I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.
I was talking just today with some coworkers about how having subscriptions instead of owning is what is normal to kids now - not just games, but things like Netflix and Spotify. So this doesn’t surprise me, but does depress me. Technofeudalism is the new normal.
In my teen years I spent a large fraction of my disposable income on music. A Spotify subscription is a vastly better value than buying whatever I could scrounge from a used CD store. Back then it was common for me to read about some semi-obscure recording and just have to wonder what it sounded like, because I had no hope of finding it in a store, and a special order was way out of my budget, especially for something I had no idea if I’d even like. Now I can listen to damn near anything that’s ever been published for less than I spent as a teenager. I find new music by listening to personalized recommendations instead of local radio stations. It’s just better in every way (except probably for the artists, but music has always been a cutthroat business so who knows).
A lot of subscription services suck and are just a way to milk customers, but streaming audio and video are not in that category.
I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).
F*** big gaming and their microtransaction/subscription/pay to win bull****! Indie and retro games are way better than overpriced AAA titles at his point anyway.
Well. This isn't going to end well. I mean there's a tiny chance they'll be bought by someone who knows well enough to be hands off, but more likely they'll be run into the ground and then have their staff slashed as a cost-cutting measure. Hopefully things turn out all right for the people working at these sites.
That’s shitty. I hope Valve goes down in this law suit but Gabe specifically asked for a remote deposition because he’s old and obese. Two serious factors for COVID or really any illness. Apparently that wasn’t enough to get them to allow remote deposition. What a really shit situation to put a person in.
It’s not even a valid excuse any more at this point. People can get vaccinated at their leisure against the current variants no problem, and other fat old dudes don’t get to bail on an uncomfortable situation either, this is just special treatment for the rich. Also all the accommodations that are already being made with everyone wearing masks. Also I’m sure they can open a fucking window or so for some fresh air
I might be more inclined to agree if there was some benefit to having him show up in person, but I don’t see why he can’t just attend this remotely. People get sick after being vaccinated too. Maybe is a minimal risk, but it seems like a pointless risk nonetheless.
It’s a court of law. People appear in person to ensure they are who they are, their answers are theirs and they fully own them, they aren’t being coerced or manipulated, and so on. FaceTimeing in from the bathroom at his home isn’t cutting it.
Why do the courts require an in person attendance? How is it okay for our government services to ignore technology? Imagine we still went with God’s will as proof of a crime. This is just the ignorance of the judge making someone take a day to come down and give their side. This whole thing could be done via text message. We just have a government that isn’t utilizing technology.
cause you would then have to dispatch a 3rd party audit to make sure Gabe isn’t reading from a teleprompter that his lawyers prep to answer any questions on the fly. You can prep your script “before” but not during, once you are on the stand you are on your own, subject to the court rules, etc.
Anything they haven’t been prepped on is just answered with I don’t know. So the end result is just who is the better actor? Who memorized their lines the best.
Did you followed the Debb vs Heard one? I know it’s kinda special case with lots of video and court recorded footage etc. Gabe isn’t exactly a celebrity that expose their private life, but if internal emails is on the table for discovery then it can also be very different. Cause they will just tell you “you said/wrote make a decision here from this email” then start off that. Like you said who is a better actor? Can you suddenly remember details with which “partial” quote are referenced without context from email 6 months ago for your argument? And then suddenly don’t remember any details making a decision 2~3 weeks ago? From neuroscience, our memory is pretty unreliable as we can fill the gap all we want. But it’s court case just how the judge/jury believed what part they saw/hear.
I hope you understand the principle of putting down names and/or title in email for paper trails is a thing, you don’t really think Valve is a “flat” structure as marketed, right? I’ve consider myself lucky that I didn’t run into much political or ethical drama thing for my career, but simply put names down and confirm the decision in writing dodge me quite a couple big bullets.
Yes but again what do those names do? They simply point a stake holder. You may put them on there stand but everyone has the ability to their 5th amendment rights. So again it doesn’t really matter and comes down to whose better under pressure which seems like an unfair justice system. Specially considering it’s a form of interrogation to force someone up on a stage and ask them a bunch of questions with tons of pressure.
I didn’t design that system, and I think it is this way because in the past without forensic evidence, the witness role basically put the burden to people who are testifying or on the stand for questions. That’s why nowadays when the suits wants to push shady things they go off record cause they don’t want to keep any evidence. It’s up to the minions to smart up to make sure you cover your own ass.
And, sometimes company make or break during trials. I don’t want to see value flop, but I also think 30% is a lot if you don’t even use steam features. (here I mean you only publish on steam, but you don’t use their DRM/Friend/Matchmaking, workshop, lobby, etc. But if a dev do indeed use those backend service I think it’s justified. )
He’s required to wear a mask. He can’t wear one while giving the deposition though. A remote deposition isn’t different than an in person one. So this argument falls flat. Why require a person to travel if we have the technology to not? Why did we even do all of this Internet building if our government services won’t use it? Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. The 80 year old judge is clearly behind the technical times and doesn’t want to learn a skill that should be required at this point.
Counterpoint: Cardinal George Pell tried to pull the same move in a child sex abuse case. Here’s Tim Minchin’s Come Home (Cardinal Pell) for your viewing pleasure.
I have (and still do) use EG for most of my news, but that has taken a slide in quality over the years. In general, they’re not receptive to developmental feedback either - though I’m not prepared to leave the blame at the editorial or mod staff door on that one when you’ve got a company like ReedPop coming in with a clear agenda to make more money, and leaving so soon.
My main concern is for DigitalFoundry - genuinely one of the best, most entertaining, and in-depth spin off channels out there.
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