I’m all for competition and against forced DRM. But the PC gaming service ʀᴇᴅᴀᴄᴛᴇᴅ that you’re referring to offers genuinely good services on top of just accessing games - social platform, (voice) chat, remote play (together), streaming video to friends, communities, easy access to mods, linux support, makes multiplayer easy, etc…
So are most services and then at some point do some type of rug pull with BS EULA changes, etc. that change the functionality of what you’re using. This is prevailant in everything now a days. I’d say with Steam the writing is on the walls. They have so much power in the PC gaming market (like with the examples you gave) it’s only a matter of time.
I do see how useful and user friendly those services you mentioned are
GOG has no DRM. Once purchased you can download the files and own it. You could even write your games to CDs if you wanted and play like the old days.
Edit. I was setting up a new laptop for my Dad. I remembered we used to play an old fighter jet game when I was young. I looked it up and found out it was Falcon 3. I then found GoG sells it. So I purchased it on my account and loaded it onto his computer with no reference to GoG, no clients, etc. It was a surprise for him when he got his new computer.
I own a lot of games on GoG, but I fail to see the practical difference. If GoG were to go under, there’s not going to be any free service hosting all your data and the games for download. It all disappears, just like if Steam were to go under.
The difference is that if you have your files you still can play the games if GoG goes under, while steam games will be unplayable because they need to communicate to steam (or have steam offline on your PC). I heard that steam drm is easy to remove but I don’t have much knowledge in that regard
If steam goes under, a significant portion of your steam games won’t launch anymore, period. If GOG goes under, you can still use 100% of their installers, provided you still have them backed up. No, they are not going to be able to do that step for you. Did the store you bought physical games from put your discs in storage for you, so they wouldn’t clog up your basement? Did they give you a new copy if you lost or threw out your disc and then changed your mind?
The vast majority of digital purchases are licenses, this isn’t something new or unique to Steam. Digital purchases where you actually own the product are more the exception than the rule.
So what do you suggest? Gog is not a contender for me unless they add equivalent regional pricing (in my region), payment options, Linux support (proton), mod workshop, easy multiplayer connectivity, community pages like guides, friend list with messaging and voice chat, etc. Would love to get things on gog but the only thing it has going is DRM free and a ton more negatives. If steam were to rug pull or whatever then I would just go back to the seas.
That’s unfortunate to hear. I doubt anything will compete with Steam with all the things you want. People need to choose to put value where it really matters and have some inconveniences. Pirating certainly won’t get you what you want. Supporting DRM free services (and the games devs) will do more good. You could download your GoG games through the Heroic launcher and it’ll use wine proton (or whatever it’s called). Also Nexus mods has a new mod manager that’ll work on Linux but it’s only in alpha stage currently.
I don’t mind the lack of launcher too much as I already use heroic and have a couple of free gog and epic games there. The biggest blocker for me rn is the payment options and not so great regional pricing compared to steam. It seems to have improved but still not enough so maybe they it will get better in a couple years.
Edit: One more thing. It’s not that I don’t want to support gog but I actually want to support steam for what they did for Linux and still be relatively consumer friendly. I wouldn’t even be using Linux right now if it wasn’t for proton.
But… the defenders of multi billion dollar corporations told me that I was a crybaby for not wanting to create an account at a company who has had several outages and security incidents over the years. I can’t believe they were wrong.
Yeah, some of the Steam reviews on God of War Ragnarok were almost exactly like this.
“Oh, no! You have to use a third-party login to play your game! Get over it, it’s a great game, who cares about you having to go out of your way to arbitrarily create an account for a platform you’ve never used before!” - essentially.
Didn’t they lift the PSN account requirement on PC just a few days ago? Imagine if they could not play the game during the outage, if Sony didn’t lift the requirements. I kinda would have loved to see this, because it could mean a huge shift in gaming based on real world proof.
Well, we already have the proof, because it was broken on PS5.
If Sony had held firm on a PSN sign-in for Helldivers 2, it would have been just as borked on PC as it was on console. Ditto for if Sony had retained its log-in requirement for singleplayer games: You could effectively play God of War Ragnarok offline after creating or logging into a PSN account (unless you opted for a handy mod), but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.
but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.
I want to address this section by the author. Should any old disc drive work offline? Yes. Do PlayStation’s? No.
In the interest of saving money, Sony doesn’t pre-pay for the Blu-Ray Disc Association License, so they use the internet to know when to pay the license fee on behalf of the user. So from a legal standpoint by an entity which does not want to get sued, their course of action to save money requires this.
I read an article testing the same disc drive in multiple PlayStations and they continued to work. My guess is that Sony pays for console X to be able to use a disc drive when one is inserted, and then pays for console Y when one is inserted. They probably can check the ID of the disc drive, but they also probably don’t care that much.
Yeah, it’s pretty okay and all, but the hype made it out to be cooler than it was, in my opinion. I’ve been playing Foundation the last day or two and I find it way more addictive, satisfying, and unique, so far. Maybe I just need to revisit Manor Lords. The trailers made the combat out to be Mount and Blade-esque, so I think that’s what really underwhelmed me. It felt more like Civilization-style “throw a bunch of units at the bad guy” combat.
after you hit the 10-15 hours mark you are just looking around like Travolta, that’s it? yep that’s it… no more content. Potential is there but will the devs deliver it? not so sure. Atm the game is overpriced.
It looks real good, but I’m still playing Aginst thr Storm, and will probably give Farthest Frontier a try before goong into this one. Still, it’s on my list!
I honestly loved it almost instantly, especially with the aspect that each settlement is a short time investment of a gaming session with semi randomized goals and build orders to get to those. While there are still overarching goals for the game as a whole.
It is advanced access, however Firaxis did an announcement shortly after release, addressing the rocky release and promising to fix things, where they (accidentally) called it early access. It seems they changed that now, still, it was there (and was made fun of) in forums and other Lemmy like communities.
I just checked and nearly choked. I’ve played every single Civ game ever made. As much as I love the series, there’s no way in hell I’m paying AU$160 for a base game.
It does include the first two expansions that will come out and leader packs and shit. I have sunk far more hours into civ than any other game. I very rarely buy a game, maybe twice a year. So it was worth it to me. I’ll play it for 500+ hours and at that point it’s 30 cents an hour of entertainment.
A great game for sure. Probably my most awaited game release.
Only issue is that I need to finish factorio before that release and I wasn’t expecting the factorio DLC to extend the game by like 3x…
Anyway Manor lords was my most played single player game for 2024 in its rather barebone build and it was already a blast. Something that brings back when I was playing Settlers as a kid but with modern graphics.
So EA put way too high of a sales target on the game, obviously held it back from becoming what it could be, and now are blaming the studio with layoffs, ensuring the next game will flop.
I don’t care what their “numbers” and “projections” were. The game was on the top 10 list in Steam. Even if it wasn’t an A+ game I’d say it looked like it at least hit Assassin’s Creed numbers, I’d hardly call that a failure. Sounds more like a failure to accurately predict, maybe they should fire their business analysts instead of the people who you know, make the games.
But the business analysts are the most profitable group, anywhere! If you don’t believe me just hire a business analyst to analyze things and they’ll prove it to you!
As a Data Analyst / Business Analyst, let me assure you: Not all of us are stupid (some are, for sure), but there’s only so much you can do about stupid managers. If they decide that a certain measure is key, it can be really hard to explain why it isn’t that important or where a certain distortion comes from. To compound this, some managers genuinely don’t understand their business processes and are unwilling to have it explained to them. They’ll make assumptions about how things work, then base their demands on those.
For an entirely made up example, consider a department manager looking to monitor a software development team’s workload. That workload, to them, consists of bug tickets and feature implementations. Not counted here are feature requests because, apparently, fielding them and discussing their feasibility isn’t actual development work. That’s management work, which is the Product Manager’s job… Except the Product Manager can’t unilaterally decide whether something is feasible without consulting those actually familiar with the code, taking up the developer’s time. On the other hand, since it’s an internally developed tool for other units, they can’t just say No to every request or else they risk people calling their team’s funding into question.
Now, you have the choice between frustrating yourself and annoying the manager by trying to explain all that, or gritting your teeth and just giving them the stupid chart on bugs closed and feature implementations completed over time. Guess which one is healthier for your employment prospects?
And we haven’t even started talking about the variance in effort of bug fixes or about non-feature work for code stability or QA. Eventually, we’ll reach the point where the measure becomes a target and you have to start reframing bug fixes as features and splitting features up into smaller features just to make the figures look nicer.
What I’m getting at is this: Sometimes, the analysts aren’t to blame, but the managers making decisions.
That’s not to say there aren’t absolutely shitty business analysts out there that will gladly figure out ways to polish the figures and then cash the check for making the figures look better.
Thank you for that perspective. It seems to be somewhat similar and thankless to when I get tasked with taking microbio samples from the machines to check for contamination and then get grumpy department leads because the analysis results show over and over again that their cleaning procedure is inefficient.
What, can’t you just… idk, check better to see how clean it actually is? That can’t be right, you probably got your samples contaminated. Were those really from that machine? Maybe you got them mixed up. Well you’re really itching to find contaminants, aren’t you? Of course you’ll find something if you look hard enough…
I don’t know how your business works, so I’m trying to project the managers I know onto it - am I so far off that I look like a manager?
Hahaha the production lead actually suggested that I might have been sick and coughed germs onto the sample sponge or that the sponges themselves were already contaminated during manufacturing, because every single sample showed high counts of pseudomonas.
Maybe instead she should start listening to us when we tell her that production equipment from 1970 might not be sufficient to run a food production with the hygiene requirements of today. But no, replacing that would cost more money than just taking samples over and over until the results are low enough (probably because by the 37th swab I cleaned the surface better than the production workers)
Couldn’t you just add up the germs found in successive swabs to the total and increase the total count with each test?
(I assume you have certain testing and evaluation standards you’re bound to, so that’s a “No”, but I like the idea of the results getting worse rather than better)
What would newer equipment do differently to make it less prone to hygiene issues?
pcgamer.com
Aktywne