It’s not that I trust Valve. It’s that I distrust them the least when compared to the other giant companies out there. And I already have 90% of my games on Steam.
I trust GOG the most, but Steam is solidly second-most. Guaranteed that if Epic had their way, the PC gaming landscape would be just as trash as the console one, if not moreso.
Valve could definitely go off the deep end after Gabe is gone, and that’s why good third-party competition is still healthy. But for right now, they’re one of the few large companies I’ve seen that aren’t on the enshittification warpath.
I too prefer GOG, but the fact that they still haven’t made a native linux port of GOG Galaxy causes me to mostly use Steam. I usually use GOG for indie stuff and thingsI want without it being tied to a launcher or DRM.
Oh, and I recently bought Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 there, as I felt it was about time I gave Chris Sawyer some money for all the fun the pirated version I downloaded 25 years ago have provided.
Have you tried the Heroic Games Launcher? It’s currently the most advanced launcher for GOG games on Linux, even implementing support for some of GOG Galaxy’s online services. Additionally it’s officially affiliated with GOG, so you can “donate” to the project by purchasing games through the client.
I have not. In fact, I’d never even heard of it until you mentioned it.
But I sure as hell will give it a go now that I am aware of its existence. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, I feel like I trust Steam as long as Gabe is calling the shots at Valve. I’m sure it helps that they’re a private company. Hopefully whoever takes over after him will have learned the lesson that you can make a nearly unimaginable amount of money in this industry without putting the screws to the consumer. If they were public or let the business “experts” in I’m sure there would be all sorts of moves to extract more money from customers that would end my trust, but I feel like overall I have a couple of decades of experience at this point that Valve isn’t actively trying to hurt me.
Oh crap… you bring up a good point. How long do we think Gave has left? There is absolutely no way Steam won’t get worse after that happens. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.
It’s also that they put out a product I actually find value from like Linux support, Steam Input, forums, workshop, etc. I enjoy using Steam because I find it to be a good experience.
It’s like reasons people prefer Android or Apple even if they share the same apps. Really can’t discount the experience simple things like navigation and social features do to add value. Those who dismiss it as unimportant probably share the same views as some MBA who only looks at the numbers and think they can just enter and corner a market through brute force spending.
I’ve played this in the past because of the unique co-op feature. You can team up with another player and play the game. You both do a battle and if you win, your units can go over to the other fight to help your buddy out. It’s super fun and I played it a good number of hours with my brother. The biggest issue however was the camera, you can’t hardly zoom out. That mean in co-op you can only see your own battle, you can go look at your buddy’s battle, but that means you can’t see your own battle. This sucked really bad, because you couldn’t see what worked and what didn’t and how it was going overall. For us this kinda ruined the co-op game mode, it was just like playing the game solo and sometimes you would get help randomly. We submitted it as feedback to the devs, saying in co-op you need to be able to see both battles at the same time, but I don’t think they ever did anything about it. So we’ve stopped playing it, maybe we’ll give it another go sometimes.
What an unexpected and strange release. Though To the Moon is still an incredible experience. It’s what any RPG Maker tinkerer dreams of releasing one of these days. I should really replay the game. Haven’t played it since its original release in 2011.
To the Moon is an awesome little narrative. One of the games that reminded me that there’s room to feel feelings in games. And the main theme song (I think performed by Laura Shigihara?) is one of my favorite pieces of music to come from a game.
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