I mean, barring Nintendo, they still are and will continue to be as long as you don’t need to have games on day one. I very rarely spend more than $20 on Xbox games. Most AAA games go on sale within the first few months. $70 Ubisoft titles will literally be $15 a month after release, not that Ubisoft makes much worth buying these days but it was just an example. The digital storefronts (again, not Nintendo) have sales constantly, you just need a little impulse control.
We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.
We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
I just don’t get why they didn’t think of quickly porting the Xbox interface over to desktop Windows. Should have been an easy fix to make handheld gaming on Windows more appealing.
It’s a lot more than that. SteamOS isn’t just Steam Big Picture Mode. There’s some special sauce in there to capture the active window so that you never lose focus of the game window and such. If you just run a Windows machine set to boot into Steam Big Picture on startup, you’ll find lots of times that you have to break out a keyboard to Alt+Tab for a variety of reasons that SteamOS never encounters. And given the other problems Windows has introduced over the past decade, that’s the least of their problems now.
5 mil yen is about $32k. In total they’re suing for about $100k.
I would imagine the 3rd patent at the very least should be invalidated - riding characters in video games predates Pokemon (MegaMan riding Rush comes to mind, as well as World of Warcraft [although I don’t know if the patent predates WOW mounts]). However the nature of patents is that once they’re granted they are very difficult to dismiss.
The other two are more tricky. Throwing balls at something us a uniquely Pokémon idea, I think, and the aiming one would come down to the technicalities of the patent itself, which is all Japanese to me.
Yeah the newer they are, the more frivolous they are - especially since you could argue the release of games using those patents amounts to public disclosure.
However, you’re still left in the situation where an established patent is very solid and difficult to challenge, even when it should never have been granted in the first place.
Ubisoft is nothing compared to Valve… You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam and it’s the biggest store by a huge margin, don’t know why Ubisoft is mentioned specifically…
Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
So they’re not DRM free then if you need Steam to download them. You also need to be connected to the internet at least once to confirm ownership, so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can’t.
DRM free and actual ownership means physical. The closest you’ll get to that with digital games is through GOG or Itch.io or anything similar where you can download the actual install files and you don’t need any launcher at all.
You can purchase the game in a web browser and use steamcmd, which (one could argue is still requiring an app) to download and install. In cases where the publisher is not invoking DRM (Larian games like BG3, DoS2, etc. for instance) once the game is downloaded you can certainly archive it and transfer it to another machine and run it there without Steam. In the end you are likely purchasing proprietary software (though again it’s not always the case on Steam) and we could say you don’t really own that either, so maybe take your complaints to the publishers or just use the power of your wallet and not buy those games and support libre games, of which there are many, another way. That said, Valve is actively making things better for users by developing and contributing to useful libre software like Proton (WINE, DXVK, etc) that can work outside of Steam.
once you downloaded the game you can copy it into a pendrive, upload it into mega or whatever storage and use it. I don’t get why y’all get so held up at the fact that steam might stop offering infinite downloads. Once you have downloaded the game you are free to burn it or store it wherever! This is different from streaming music for example, since with music you never have a local copy you can work with.
so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can’t.
You can. I have several games where I can literally copy the game folder into another computer, press the executable and be able to play it offline. Terraria, vampire survivors, stardew valley, pathfinder: WOTR, Grim Dawn, AoE2… And more. I literally have “backup” zips of several path versions of grim dawn to play different mods because I’m too lazy to patch the game each time I want to replay different versions.
DRM free and actual ownership means physical
Once the game it’s in your system it’s as physical as it can get. There’s no difference of storage in your disk, a pendrive, an external drive or an optical CD. You give the example of GoG, there’s plenty games in steam that once “installed” have all the files in the game folder and you can easily move them.
In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network,” Valve reps have said, “measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.
Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.
In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.
PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.
“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.
Except they have proven this so far to be accurate. Games that have long since been removed from sale are still downloadable for people who purchased them at the time. Which is more than others can say.
Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.
Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.
“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.
If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.
Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.
But the steam network is still around. When steam actually shuts down and no longer has the infrastructure to provide downloads for games, I have no idea what their plan is. They hypothetically could provide a way to remove the DRM, but I doubt that it’s something the publishers of games would allow.
Just people trying to ride the wave for internet points without really knowing what they’re talking about. It’s just the popular “current thing” to hate on.
To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.
Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.
That’s just how it is.
Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.
Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).
To be fair, that’s all Bethesda’s games have been since Oblivion. And I’m not just talking about the plethora of Skyrim re-releases. None of their games are really all that different from the formula they laid down with Oblivion.
I actually wouldn’t mind an older game in a new package. I love seeing old movies remade (if they’re well done) and I would love if we could do the same for games. There are some really great remakes like Black Mesa, System Shock, Final Fantasy 7 (though I guess the jury is still out on that one considering it’s split into multiple games that haven’t been released), Demons souls, Resident evil etc. I think a lot of Morrowind fans would salivate over the idea of getting a Morrowind remake that contains the entire province of Morrowind and not just Vvardenfell (+ Mournhold and Solstheim), as long as it stays true to the feeling of Morrowind.
What I do mind are remasters. That’s just slapping a new coat of paint on an old game. Remakes (especially good ones) take effort and will feel fresh, remasters however are pretty much just cash grabs. Considering Oblivion is supposedly getting a remaster I have zero interest in it.
Honestly more commentary on the state of gaming in general with rereleases happening all the time. Bethesda did release Skyrim like five separate times.
But it’s not just Bethesda. Final Fantasy is getting remakes. Persona 3 is being remade. Blizzard is working on rereleases. The Resident Evil games are being remade. Like hasn’t resident evil 4 been released three times now?
Skyrim rerelease doesn’t really change anything, I don’t even think it cost Bethesda much to rerelease it. Your other listed games are remakes made from ground up. It’s like comparing Indie games and AAA games in term of development
There’s a good mixture. Some of the games I listed were literally just ports to he new hardware. Some were complete remakes. I’d say most of Skyrim lies somewhere in-between. It’s the base game, plus the 3 DLC’s, plus however many officially-sanctioned mods or platform-specific changes like for VR, Alexa (lol), or Switch. The re-release and different edition names are trying to set up boundaries and market the amorphous blob that most mod-heavy PC games are to console users.
This isn’t anything new though. How many different platforms has Super Mario Brothers been playable on? Or Sonic 2?
The best games of every generation get brought to the next. Whether it’s older stuff like Super Mario All Stars or the various Sega Ages and Classic collections. Most great PS1 and PS2 games saw release on the PS3, either digitally or in various physical collections. Tons of PS3 games have been re-released on PS4. Despite no backwards compatibility, there’s only a few PS3 exclusive titles left stuck on that platform. I don’t even know how many WiiU games are left that have not been ported to switch yet: that might be in the single-digits.
I don’t see how Skyrim is much different, but for some reason the Internet loves to hate it Skyrim and Bethesda in particular. Don’t get me wrong: they’re a giant soulless corporation. But there’s so many other corporations that have had way more consumer-unfriendly practices. Re-releasing a game on multiple platforms with new content added, usually at a pretty good price, just seems consumer friendly to me.
For me, I don’t mind that they re-release tesv on whatever potato they can fit it on, it’s that they keep doing this for over 10 years, but where tesvi? Maybe they got grrm writing it.
It's not as critical for Bethesda's series, because the stories don't intertwine, but one good reason to update some series is that the games span a really long period of time, to the point where only players who grew up with the series will have played the whole thing. Otherwise, players can only play the later games in a series.
Just because you bought something and never picked it up it isn’t the stores fault. If you buy a perpetual license to digital code then never download it then cry when the store stops providing the source or updating it sounds like a you problem. Now a SaaS thing is weird. Like what do i do when I own a license for Helldivers 2 and the service turns off. That is like paying a person a lump sum for a service like trash but it is one person and you expect it to last at least 50 years since that person is young and they die next week. Now you are out the money and the service expecting the service would never end
So he was messaging a minor and Twitch just got him off their platform and nothing more happened? No repercussions for what he was allegedly doing from a legal standpoint?
Twitch probably doesn't care beyond reputational damage/liability.
a settled lawsuit between Twitch and Beahm, where neither party admitted to any wrongdoing, and his contract was paid.
In fact it sounds like Twitch made an effort to keep it quiet, which was successful until these former employees spoke out (hope they don't suffer consequences)
Edit to add: Which is not to say there couldn't be separate consequences. It's just not going to come from Twitch. I'm sure a certain three letter agency is quite a bit more interested in Beahm now.
If Twitch helped to cover up a criminal act, they’d be opening themselves up to liability. Especially since they supposedly provide the product used for the communication AND apparently knew about it.
The simpler answer is, the reality isn’t as simple as the tweet makes it out to be. Twitch may have thought/known the user was a minor based off internal-only information, like previous messages, account information, etc. not anything in the conversation with Doc. In that case Doc would not have known they were a minor, and thus his actions would not have been illegal, and it would not be a story at all if Twitch reached out to advise Doc that the user was a minor… instead Twitch acted unilaterally and essentially burned the contract in the process. That would fit the same “facts” we’ve been told from all parties, but with a vastly different context that also matches the lack of criminal liability.
So what would he do that’s not illegal but bad enough to get banned? What would he do that would also explain why people are saying he was messaging minors for a meet up? Why would Twitch pay out the contract?
So what would he do that’s not illegal but bad enough to get banned?
Twitch is a private platform, they could ban him for whatever reason they wanted.
Disney dropped Johnny Depp because of the Amber Heard thing, but what did he do to deserve that? Twitch dropping Dr. Disrespect was probably entirely about optics.
I don’t know anything about him, I don’t watch him or anything. But if he did break the law, he absolutely would have been arrested. AFAIK, sexual assault/misconduct or whatever with a minor doesn’t have a stipulation that the minor can choose to not press charges, thats up to the prosecuting attorney. They almost always press charges, and they should. So if something illegal did infact take place, he would have been arrested.
Most of the times when people get busted for “chatting” to kids online, it’s because the child is actually a law enforcement officer who has gotten the person to admit their intent in a way that isn’t legally questionable.
Even if twitch reported the allegations to law enforcement, it’s unlikely any prosecutor is going to bring up charges on a famous/wealthy person unless they have an open and shut case. Which is really rare outside of sting operations.
Eh, it could be a multitude of reasons. It could be that they just had a bad contract. Even if there is a morality clause, how that morality clause is enacted may be dependent on actual charges being filed.
It is possible they had a reasonable concern about the situation, but it wasn’t drastic enough for them to legally terminate the contract. Wanting to save face in this scenario isn’t exactly too hard to imagine considering their demographics.
Or it could be that it was simply cheaper to pay the rest of the contract than it would to arbitrate in court. Or they may have feared themselves being further implicated during a proceeding if someone at twitch enabled or tried to cover it up.
honestly the only way people will 100% be able to understand as to why they’d have to see the contract Twitch had with Guy at the time. I wouldn’t put it past twitch if they had a really loose and shitty contract. could simply be a matter of “we want you off the platform, we weren’t smart enough to have a solid mortality clause if any at all, so we have to pay out the rest of your term”.
and Guy could have been speaking the truth when he originally said 4 years ago he didn’t know why he was banned. They could have simply banned him and hoped he wouldn’t fight it. He threatens to take them to court for the money he feels he’s owed and rather than potentially expose the victim they just decided to settle.
I mean knowing Guy’s fanbase that’s the route I would have personally taken. The last thing I would want is some kid that Guy was sexting to be potentially exposed and then harassed or threatened by insane 30+ year old dudes. it’s happened before in cases like this.
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