Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it’ll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
What’s the difference? In practical terms, what does this mean for me as the consumer? We don’t own the intellectual property, but may use the software as-is? From a practical, consumer standpoint that feels the same as the days of owning your software on a disc, unable to be taken as long as you have physical control over the device. I’m fine with calling this “owning” personally.
I’m absolutely willing to be wrong on this. I’m by no means an expert. Please, if I have missed something, let me know.
There really is no difference. For almost all intents and purposes, GOG’s offline installers can be treated the same way as physical CDs of way back then, with one of the only exceptions being that you cannot resell them.
Depending on your perspective, the sell/trade/loan aspect of physical can be a huge deal. I outlined in another comment, selling/trading games was never my thing, but it was my cousins. From my perspective, there’s marginal difference, but there IS a difference.
I don’t want to advocate for shoveling money into any company, but if you could sell your steam games it would screw over indie devs in a big way. Many games made by small studies or one person don’t have as much content as AAA studies and would be far more prone to a small handful of copies being distributed back and forth on the used market instead of each being a sale that goes to the developer.
Some devs would see a drop in sales as much as 90% and I just don’t think it’s worth it to shoot the gaming industry in the foot like that.
Just to be clear: my main point was that you don’t own any more the game bought on GOG than on Steam.
And there are definitely upsides to this type of market.
Although nowadays I wouldn’t buy a just released triple A 70€ game knowing I can’t sell or give it (not that I play those much anymore). The games I actually want to keep a few and far between.
I buy second hand Switch games for my nephews. It’s cheap, I’m actually giving them something, and they can trade them with their friends or sell them to buy fortnite skins the little shits
Again, not hating on GOG, I’ve been a customer for a long time. Mainly because I don’t want any kind of launcher. I play 99% solo games, don’t need no updates or multiple clicks to launch a game.
I would ABSOLUTELY argue that you more own a game purchased on gog, with an offline installer, than one purchased on steam. I now see the functional difference between owning a drm-free installer vs owning a physical game, but there’s also a gulf of difference between steam and gog
Just to be entirely fair. The rest of what you said is absolutely spot on.
I can see the functional difference there, with regards to sell/trade/loan. You could of course emulate the functionality, or rely on the honor system for abandon ware stuff, but that’s clunky, inefficient, not worth the energy.
I hadn’t considered the second hand aspect. Even as a kid, I was always more a “build a library” kind of person versus a “cycle my catalog” kind of person. I was considering things from an availability to play the game perspective alone. Thanks for the different perspective!
I think it might be more subtle than that, unions exist so that when negotiations happen they can fuck back, but we know Microsoft can strategise longer term than that. They pioneered “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Embracing a union then trying to infiltrate and turn it into a corporatised union is another version of that exact same play.
It’s more likely a cost benefit analysis. Fighting the Unions is lawyer expensive and PR expensive. Gamers are noisy after all, when riled up. Microsoft is evil, but also like Trump, they understand optics.
Companies can leverage CBAs to “fix” pay scales well below CPI or other metrics by forcing extensive negotiation as a way to sell down an agreement. Similarly, they can use agreements to create separate classes, for example: the SAG/AFTRA agreement for voice actors with all the Gen AI exemptions.
In some respects, I can see this. Games such as unscrupulous MMOs are often carefully engineered to distort your ability to manage time and money. However, many games are still produced as entertainment products meant to compete on a basis of artistic or entertainment value. The addictive aspect doesn’t come from a manipulative design, but Rather just plain old fun, and in those cases similar arguments could be made about strawberries or books.
I would like to reiterate that there are addictive video games which really do try to manipulate you. Just like how a breakfast cereal might market itself as healthy and balanced while loaded with sugar and deceptive portion sizes, leading to unhealthy habits, a money first video game will contain elements carefully crafted to distort player’s perception and reasoning.
Gamers can understand this. Casinos understand this. But how do you articulate the difference to a court or actually legislate against it? FOMO is usually used in a predatory way, like with daily rewards. Paid random lootboxes are definitely predatory, but other rng systems can be genuinely fun. Not an easy problem to solve without stepping on toes.
Dailies are probably something that could be solved with targetted legislation. Harmful to player mental health just to boost stats for investors. Some games need to limit progression, but there are loads of ways to do so other than dailies.
I can’t get into the whole debate because I’m not knowledgeable enough to articulate the difference between a genuinely good game and games using skinnerbox mechanics to force operant conditioning. However, I have an anecdote.
I used to play a mobile game that was mid level fun, but a very obvious skinnerbox with time based turns (energy? Mana stones? Hell, I don’t remember), daily and weekly battles, sporadic new releases where you had a chance to get some kind of cool stuff, and clan activities. I had to put it down for a couple of weeks due to real life and just never picked it back up. I still talk to some of the guys on discord but after not being on every day I stopped caring about the game entirely.
I know people tend to joke about having a Civ addiction, but the number of people who have in fact binged an entire night or more playing civilization and have experience addiction like relationships with it should tell you that the line is thinner than I think most people are comfortable with.
Few games are “just good old fashioned fun.” Every game is designed to draw our attention. The distinctions between intent/accident, “it’s just fun”/designed to be addicting, etc. are not always very clear.
There’s no reason for that to be a directed force, just suck in air from multiple directions and eject it in multiple directions to cancel out all net forces. Or ramp it up slowly so it isn’t so jerky. But even if it’s set up in the worst way possible, the forces will be significantly less than shooting a relatively massive bullet.
Nah, active air cooling is a thing that computers have been using successfully for decades. It does create more heat overall, but it moves heat away from the parts you don’t want to melt.
Even liquid cooling or phase change cooling relies on air cooling eventually, those techs can just move heat quicker to a temporary heat reservoir that is then air cooled. If the cooling on the reservoir is slower than the heating, the cooling system will eventually saturate and fail to continue cooling the heat source faster than the reservoir cooling.
Even liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling does this, it just dumps that heat earlier when the N2 or CO2 is condensed. And for those, you either have limited cooling time or need to top up the coolant as it evaporates.
Edit: not sure why you were downvoted… Your assumption was wrong but IMO worthy of discussion.
But in essence, because they carry energy they must have momentum. It’s why they can impart momentum on what they hit, because momentum must be preserved.
You know that old E=mc² equation? That’s actually only the simplified “rest” half of it. The full equation that relativity gives us says E²=m²c⁴+p²c². Meaning if it has energy, it definitely has mass (m), momentum (p), or both.
For a massless particle like a photon, that means E=pc, and its momentum is proportional to its energy and therefore frequency/wavelength.
The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.
Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.
But if I shot that raynof sunshine in auch a way that it killed someone I would be okay with assuming there would be more force than just a standard ray
Okay I did some math. If the gun shot a single photon with all the energy of a .50BMG from an M2 heavy machine gun, it would have about 1.2e-4 Ns of momentum. For reference, the bullet it’s compared to would have 38.3 Ns. So the photon has about 32000 times less momentum than a bullet. Do with that what you will.
From what I’ve read about their Daily Active Users they’re going to be overstaffed soon. No hate but they exploded and when things settle they might not need as much staff. Thoughts?
You’re good. I’d have thought the same thing had I not been following the development story.
Their game pass numbers also seem to be going up, which is harder to dev for as well. I know my steam friends got sick of it after putting in 100 hours in three weeks though
I too have sunk more then 100 hours into the game. It was worth its purchase already. Yet in a year or however long it takes to be complete… i and many others will jump right back on to see how everything has progressed. Plus they’ll release on play station and that alone will be millions more copies sold.
This is how it happens. If they dont staff to meet the demand the game suffers and dies out, if they do in a few years when the player base falls off and they announce layoffs everyone makes the shocked Pikachu face.
Live service games really did a number on people. Why does it matter if people stop playing Palworld between now and when those new people they hire can produce the things they're hired for?
Yeah I keep thinking this too, it’s a buy once game, they still have the money they made. They’re trying to push more content as quick as possible to get more waves of players, new and old. I’m positive their accountants know the player base isn’t rebuying the game.
There's something called "Brook's Law" that basically observes that a software project which onboards more developers in order to catch up will fall further behind. I hope they're careful about how they allocate new developers or they'll end up doing a year of onboarding, rewriting core code, and have no meaningful updates for 6-12 months. I know they have the resources to spare, and that scenario worked out okay for Valheim, but I hope the game doesn't lose momentum because they overhire or don't allocate enough senior devs to continue feature development while they catch the new devs up to speed.
Edit to add: I don't think it actually matters in this instance if they don't have a large player base by the time the game is feature complete. They don't have continuous revenue streams like a live service game, so hiring more devs is ultimately just about making sure they have enough talent to make good on their early access promises. The company could probably dissolve tomorrow and all the staff could live the rest of their lives in luxury never working again. It'd be a dick move, but they already sold an insane number of copies.
They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service
Yet. The game seems extremely easy to monetize, up to them how evil they go. To be successful longterm (if thats something they even want) they will need to add more content first but they could cash in in so many ways. Dlc, selling servers, cosmetics or more nefarious stuff lkke boosters to speed up mechanics, pals that take huge grinds without payments. It would be very easy to do.
MSI says that this game tracking won’t just be limited to League of Legends, as it’ll be releasing an application that’ll allow you to train these features to recognise and react to enemies and other on-screen elements in any game you like.
The whole unfair advantage thing aside, this is a really cool feature that might have a bigger range of application than just gaming.
Yeah like reading MRIs and X-rays, it’s already been proven that those reading medical images tend to have blinders on looking only for what they regularly see and never see the gorilla. With AI they might see the more weird things.
They have a tiered system where important NPCs can't die until conditions are satisfied, wonder if the condition to die was satisfied but dialog still got delivered?
Why are people taking this even remotely seriously? This is Pitchford doing marketing for BL4. BL3 already showed people don't want Epic exclusivity and there's no such thing as Steam exclusivity. They can choose to release exclusively on Steam but that's just artificial exclusivity because nothing about Steam prevents them from releasing on Epic or GOG.
It's a pointless poll made by Pitchford either to keep BL4 in the media cycle or to just shit stir, possibly both.
That's what I mean by artificial exclusivity. There are games where the developer or publisher decided it's the only platform they will release on but that kind of "exclusivity" is not at all the same as Epic paying developers or publishers to not release on Steam. Valve/Steam doesn't prevent those games being released elsewhere, the developers/publishers themselves don't want to.
I could understand smaller (I'm talking literal solo devs or studios with less than 10 people) choosing to be exclusively on Steam. Supporting other platforms can have huge overhead costs for them. But for a studio the size of Gearbox there's no benefit to being exclusively on Steam. They have enough support staff to manage multiple stores. There maybe be suits wondering if it's worth being exclusively on Epic but there are no suits sitting around wondering whether to be exclusively on Steam or not, the answer is obviously not.
Any chance he’s putting the question on social media to convince other stakeholders above him?
It’s possible he was in a board meeting when some novice shareholder suggested “What if you take an exclusivity deal”? And he just didn’t have clear evidence on hand of that being vastly unpopular. Obviously that could be me being overgenerous to him.
There is a chance but what is he convincing them of? That they should take a non-existent exclusivity deal with Steam? They already have the data that exclusivity with Epic does not work and Steam doesn't do exclusivity deals.
Pitchford is a cunt when he wakes up, and when he goes to bed he reviews a checklist to make sure he still retains the appropriate level of cunt in his daily routine.
He’s not doing anything unless it makes Randy Pitchford more rich, or alternatively, makes sure he’s still a cunting waste of life.
pcgamer.com
Ważne