The current government strategy of illegal use of copyrighted materials, often with the full understanding that the artist/IP owners will not consent to it should really have a harsher punishment to it. The DHS social media pages in particular keep using songs without artist permission because they know it will be taken down but by that point it doesn’t matter and they just steal another song. Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist, this should absolutely count as the rights of the artists to free speech are being infringed upon.
If an artist consents to the use of their song in a specific way, it’s not a matter of belief at all. It just is tacit approval. So when the government does this without consent, until the moment the artist responds, the implication is that the artist has approved it. Which isn’t as big a deal if a private entity does it, but it’s a much bigger deal when the federal government does it.
I hear the game is supposed to be fun so I suppose I should give it a shot. But styling they give the characters and weapons, essentially junk weapons and raiders from Fallout wearing whatever goofy scrap they can find puts me so far off. Like not everything has to be perfectly tacticool but like, something closer to the Metro series would be dope
They are inherently a sweat fest by their very nature and they appeal to a crowd that enjoys high risk high reward gameplay. Theres nothing wrong with you for not being into it. Not everybody’s dream job is being a fireman and running into burning buildings before lunch either.
But it’s one of those niche genres that scratch an itch that more casual games don’t.
I’m rewatching Babylon 5 and it’s putting me in the mood for an immersive game where I get to command a spaceship and blast stuff with lasers or plasma cannons or whatever....
It feels like it's really getting out of hand and the language of the negative reviews seems really fake too. I just bought a game that got review bombed and it was fine. From the reviews it sounded like it was going to destroy my graphics card, corrupt my hard drive and be full of bugs. Luckily I watched some gameplay vids and...
The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.
I think the biggest problem is that when people are just browsing games, all that’s shown is overall and mixed reviews. They should add a similar indicator to that view of the game.
I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.
I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.
Platform infrastructure like PSN costs an inordinate amount of money. People owning games they paid for does not cost you any money.you already made your money back by selling them the ownership.
Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.
They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.
You don’t buy… the fact that infrastructure that has to scale to millions of users globally, and the salaries of the many employees who maintain it cost money…? Buddy that shit costs literal millions a year.
Nintendos online user services were never free. They went from not having them, to having them and charging money.
And yes Steam is eating a metric shit ton of costs to give you those services for free. Because PCs are an open platform, they have to compete to keep you on their storefront. They eat all those costs because you don’t have to buy new hardware in order to switch.
These are very, very simple concepts you’re failing to grasp.
Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online
What you’re both failing to grasp here is that the infrastructure existed when it was free. They always needed the infrastructure, and it always cost money. There is no “before”. They were just eating the costs as a marketing strategy to attract Xbox players who at the time had to pay for Xbox Live.
As console adoption increased, so did the cost of the infrastructure and the salaries of the many people it takes to maintain it, it just wasn’t feasible to provide those services for free when it cost so much money to maintain.
it was foolish to start paying PS in the first place when literally every other console had free multi-player
Every other console did not have free multiplayer. Xbox Live always cost money.
Company gets a cut of every game sold, gets exponentially more customers that use your infrastructure on a day to day basis, meanwhile the price of games stays the same for 20 years and game development cycles get longer while games and infrastructure gets more expensive to make.
I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.
I don’t. Valve is in a super sweet spot in the market and their near-monopoly on PC game sales and lean business model gives them a lot of breathing room that Companies like Sony don’t have. Some benefits Valve has:
They don’t need to worry about R&D of exclusive hardware often sold at a loss just to capture a user base. Valve has dipped its toes into hardware now, but even if its competitors eat some of its market share, those users will still buy games from Steam. On the other hand If people buy an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, Sony just loses out on the customers.
Valve doesn’t have to operate a number of first and second party game studios to churn out increasingly more expensive games.
Steam being a storefront on another company’s operating system means it can rely on external infrastructure to handle user services in many of its games.
Valve is a privately owned company so they have a lot more wiggle room to tread water and “stay afloat” when necessary and aren’t being driven to an ever-increasing profitability targets year after year.
Valve literally can’t charge you for their user services because you’re not stuck on their hardware. The very moment they do, they’ll lose all the user goodwill that has made them the default in their space and everybody can just pack up and move to another storefront or even just pirate their games. Valve has to eat those costs at the expense of everything else.”, they have no choice.
Well there was just some base level of hope in the back of some people’s minds that one day they might get their shit together and now that hope is entirely gone.
Fret not, anything they aren’t going to actively milk will likely be sold off to try and pay back the $20 billion dollar loan they took to make this purchase.
I’m seeing a lot of games with what seems like a much steeper discount than usual. First thing I do when there’s a steam sale is look at my wishlist and sort by discount and there are a lot of games on sale for 90% off, many of which only a couple dollars.
There’s a difference between a game being way outside of your specs because it’s graphically very advanced and your hardware is old, and a game just being unoptimized slop that expects its users to deal with by throwing higher specs at a fixable problem.
I have a brand new 5070ti that can play all kinds of UE5 games with much better graphics than BL4 at 4k resolution with ray tracing at a decent frame rate without relying on frame gen. And I’m in the top few percentiles here.
I think he’s being upvoted and you’re being downvoted because boss runbacks have been around for a long time and both the industry and community have since come to a consensus that they’re just objectively bad game design. They don’t add anything of value to a game and their existence is a detriment to the experience. I don’t think you’ll find a single person who holds the opinion that they’re fun. People like yourself may tolerate them, but a tolerable inconvenience is not the same thing as fun. You’ve actually gone exceptionally out of your way to avoid calling them fun.
Like with anything, not all personal opinions are going to be held in equal regard. And your take here is going to be an outlier so I wouldn’t be surprised if you continue to get this reception.
It’s only subjective in that it’s not entirely impossible for at least one person out there to enjoy the mechanic. However at the same time there has been a general consensus made that it’s not a good mechanic. Your opinion may be the equal of any one other persons opinion, but what I think you’re not understanding is that is that it’s not the equal of the many opinions of the majority of people. If you expect your one opinion to hold the same value as the collective opinions of everyone else, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
as a sort of olive branch of understanding that opinions are opinions.
That’s not a great example to your point because the weapon degradation mechanic of BOTW is also widely regarded as a bad mechanic. It’s the most disliked mechanic in that game.
Both games are currently on sale on Steam for about the same price ($59.99 CAD vs $58.49 CAD). I’ve never played either. I know they’re both supposed to be excellent games. My question is, for those who have played both, which do you prefer?...
What I would also note is that the story in BG3 is still very linear. The branching paths are small deviations along the main path and can affect the ending, but the story doesn’t really change a whole lot so it’s not as daunting as it sounds.
The differences in choices in BG3 are more like flavor so that the story doesn’t railroad you into a certain character archetype. Replaying BG3 and making different choices mainly just rewards you with different companions and cutscenes, new paths through the 3 main areas, and more or less different side quests or even parallel main quests.
This game has added so many systems over the years, but it still just hasn’t really grown into anything of substance. It’s a game where the only real “thing to do” is mindless busywork. 200 new systems, all created to a standard of absolute minimum viability, none of them are very rewarding on their own, and none of them really create interesting interactions with each other. It’s like they every system was added with the idea that they’re optional, which makes them all feel unnecessary.
You can build bases now, but there’s no real reason to other than to do so. There are settlements you can become the leader of? But what that entails is essentially nothing. The game is designed from the ground up for you to move from planet to planet without lingering too long on any particular one, and yet they added a bunch of mechanics based around specific planets.
In the endless exploration, yes. In the myriad of other slapped together mechanics that don’t really tie into the exploration at all, no.
The exploration of new planets is well implemented, but that’s existed since the game launched. If you were happy with that then, you’ll be happy with it now. But the game was panned due to there not really being anything else to it. And after all these years and added mechanics there still sort of isn’t.
I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...
Right now, I don’t have a PC. Long ago, when I did have one, the first AAA game I ever played was Red Dead Redemption 2. I have played other games, but I feel like RDR2 surpasses all of them and is legitimately one of the greatest games ever made. The amount of details dedicated to realism, the solid storyline, the amazing...
The game is essentially a trudge from shooting gallery to shooting gallery, with a large open world to do very little of consequence in. There isn’t really anything more to it than what’s on the surface. Either you enjoy the slow burn cowboy experience or you don’t. It doesn’t really get any better.
Apologies for YouTuber link - as some of the sources cited are in Japanese, it’s harder to get to a direct English source. The video description includes links to the Yahoo.jp article.
As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
The WoW thing wasn’t about being selfish, it’s just one of a dozen or more incidents of him being a narcissistic bully who screws other people over and can’t take accountability for anything.
And nobody is giving him too much shit for simply being a nepo baby. The Blizzard thing is about him being a fraud who’s been caught repeatedly lying and misleading people about his credentials and work experience in order to appear like an expert. He uses his time at Blizzard like a magic wand to expel criticism, going so far as to misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority when people criticize him.
The backlash against him has been well earned by bad behavior over a long period of time, most of which involves him treating other people poorly for his own benefit.
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though?
No.
I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
That would in fact make those people indie game devs. Thats not a high bar to meet. Pirate likes to word it as if he was a game dev in the industry, and often leaves the context of him just working in QA out. As for the cybersecurity role, his role dealt mostly with the human aspect of the business. Compliance, awareness training, etc. the most active things he did were social engineering phone calls. Yet he has explicitly calls himself “a hacker”.
they’re all working their way to the boss together 2. they start getting wrecked, so some (all?) decide to bail 3. he casts some spell to help his team get out, using up the rest of his mana 4. his teammate is about to die and asks for help he keeps running, as was the plan 5. he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to
You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana. Which changes number 5 a bit as a consequence.
he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains lies that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to (Even though he could have. He just didn’t want to)
Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that.
Well you have done a pretty good job of focusing on just two of the things he’s been in hot water over, and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen. So yeah I wouldn’t want you to jump on a bandwagon without any evidence, but at the same time you’ve explained that you haven’t seen most of the evidence. So I’m not sure what the point of you weighing in here against the people who have seen all the evidence, from a perspective that hasn’t seen the evidence is.
There are hours and hours of video, photo, and written accounts of other events so I’m not just going to recap it all here for you, but it’s all out there for you to find. One of my favorites is when he’s playing another MMO on stream and a dungeon run his party does is ruined by someone accidentally pulling an extra mob. Pirate proceeds to be a huge dick about it. He doesn’t give the person who pulled it the benefit of the doubt like you have to Pirate. At the end of his rant it’s pointed out to him by his own chat that he himself was the one who pulled the mob lol. After which instead of apologizing, he then says he’s not sorry about what he did. He’s so unabashed about his view that only other people make mistakes.
I don’t think he’s been swatted. In fact, a lot of the “backlash” that Pirate has complained about has also been debunked.He said he had to step away from his role at a game publisher because people were “Reviewing bombing all of the company’s games”. Somehow he didn’t realize that game reviews are public and in the case of Steam reviews very detailed. People went right to the Steam reviews and found that literally none of the games had been review-bombed.
On the contrary, since the backlash started he’s been calling for his fans to brigade and mass report anyone who criticizes him, live on stream. He filed a lawsuit against a guy who made a game and put a cameo of Pirate in his game as a cockroach wearing Pirates signature wizards hat. (A cockroach is the wow term for people who do what Pirate did)
As for the resignation, generally companies don’t like to have people who are ongoing, unapologetic public menaces to be the faces of their company. Any consequences Pirate faces are all of his own doing. If you’re going to be a public figure, you have to understand that you’re going to be held accountable for your behavior by somebody.
I saw some “review bombing” on his game Heartbound.
heartbound is his game. It’s not published by the company he resigned from. It also isn’t just people review bombing it for some unrelated reason. His game has been in early access hell for years with no sign of ever releasing to the people who’ve backed him and paid for it. And after he started getting all this attention, various developers have been digging into his code and finding out that’s it’s coded horribly, and the chances of him finishing the game with the way it’s coded are low. And in PirateSoftware fashion, he’s been having his fanbase brigade, harass, threaten, and abuse the developers who criticize his coding instead of praise it, which has only made it blow up even more. It’s not review bombing of the reviews are legitimately criticizing the game. The fact that they’re so recent is because Pirates poor behavior is putting his game in the spotlight.
So my take here is that he was worried that reaction would spread to the other studio
Your take would be wrong. He didn’t say he resigned because he was worried about the publishers games getting potentially review bombed in the future. He said they had been review bombed, in the affirmative. Which was yet another PirateSoftware lie.
I disagree, but I don’t know much about him.
Well this keeps coming up and it’s getting really weird that you keep making the point of “Here is my opinion on something, strong enough to believe others are wrong, even though I’m ignorant to most of what’s going on here”.
Perhaps before you make any more assertions you should just go and… figure out what it is you’re talking about? I don’t mean to be rude but your opinions just mean less than nothing when they’re admittedly based on ignorance. Ive explained a lot to you here and it’s not even close to all of it. Before you go defending him more, you should see what he’s actually about.
US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
ARC Raiders Just Became Steam's Most Popular Extraction Shooter and It's Not Even Close (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Space battle games for casual player? angielski
I’m rewatching Babylon 5 and it’s putting me in the mood for an immersive game where I get to command a spaceship and blast stuff with lasers or plasma cannons or whatever....
Is it me or does it seem like review bombing on Steam has become so much worse recently? angielski
It feels like it's really getting out of hand and the language of the negative reviews seems really fake too. I just bought a game that got review bombed and it was fine. From the reviews it sounded like it was going to destroy my graphics card, corrupt my hard drive and be full of bugs. Luckily I watched some gameplay vids and...
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Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" (www.gamespot.com) angielski
EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Right…
Former BioWare lead writer reads the runes on EA-Saudi deal and speculates that 'guns and football' are in, 'gay stuff' is out, and the venerable RPG studio may be for the chop (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Steam Autumn Sale 2025 Has Begun (store.steampowered.com) angielski
What are you buying?
Ghost of Yotei | Review Thread (89/100 OpenCritic) angielski
Game Information...
Borderlands 4 Patch Due Out Today, PC Performance 'Our Top Priority,' Gearbox Says (www.ign.com) angielski
Huh. I thought this was already perfectly optimized?
'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash (www.ign.com) angielski
'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing (www.thegamer.com) angielski
AAA game? Performance issues and crashing on release? Why I never.
Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks (www.ign.com) angielski
Civilization 7 developers Firaxis have laid off an unspecified number of workers, 2K confirm (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? angielski
Both games are currently on sale on Steam for about the same price ($59.99 CAD vs $58.49 CAD). I’ve never played either. I know they’re both supposed to be excellent games. My question is, for those who have played both, which do you prefer?...
No Man's Sky: Voyagers update releases today, introduces customizable "colossal, fully furnished, completely bespoke Corvette-class starships" (www.nomanssky.com) angielski
As someone who last tried No Man’s Sky out about 5 years ago, it looks like it’s time to give it another shot.
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Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy (www.polygon.com) angielski
Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...
Red Dead Redemption 2 was amazing. angielski
Right now, I don’t have a PC. Long ago, when I did have one, the first AAA game I ever played was Red Dead Redemption 2. I have played other games, but I feel like RDR2 surpasses all of them and is legitimately one of the greatest games ever made. The amount of details dedicated to realism, the solid storyline, the amazing...
[VIDEO] Japan Sanctions Visa after the Censorship of Anime and Manga (youtu.be) angielski
Apologies for YouTuber link - as some of the sources cited are in Japanese, it’s harder to get to a direct English source. The video description includes links to the Yahoo.jp article.
Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? angielski
As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
Stop Killing Games reaches its goal of 1.4M signatures, covering the risk of valid signatures going under 1M angielski
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/...
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The Steam controller was ahead of its time angielski
The original Steam Controller is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of gear I own—and one of the most innovative, too....