Just so we're clear, the first pass of localization of every game you've played in the past decade has been machine-generated.
Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it's been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it's pretty nuts.
Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I'm... kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn't clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.
As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I'm confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it'd be a bit of drama.
I guess I don't know what "AI generated" means anymore.
I haven't bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I'm playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn't have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.
That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.
For the record, the word as a general noun is widely recognized to mean what everybody thinks it means:
Luddite
noun
Ludd·ite ˈlə-ˌdīt
: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest
broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
One of the weirder annoyances of the AI moral panic is how often you see this spiral of pedantry about the historical luddites whenever someone brings up the word as a pejorative.
I mean, fair rhetorical play, I suppose, in that it creates a very good incentive to not bring it up at all. If the goal was to avoid being called a luddite as an insult or as shorthand for dismissing AI criticism as outright technophobia I suppose that is mission accomplished, disingenuous as it is.
It is also correct that someone disagreeing with me can be doing so because of a moral panic. Our agreement is entirely disconnected to whether there is a moral panic at play or not.
For the record, I think "AI" is profoundly problematic in multiple ways.
This is also unrelated to whether there is a moral panic about it. Which there absolutely is.
As a non-native English speaker, let me tell you, terrible localization was very much a thing that happened well before machine translation, so that by itself (and more subtle typos or one-off errors) was definitely not enough to infer that someone had forgotten to fix a machine-translated line once.
You can definitely tell when something has been machine-translated and not fixed, but the real challenge is lack of context. This leads to nonsensical localization even today, whether it's human or automated, especially in crowdsourced localizations, which are frequent in open source software. I contribute to some on occassion and maaaan, do I wish well intentioned people in that space would stop contributing to projects they don't use/lines they haven't seen in situ.
I hadn't clicked through to the Reddit thing (for obvious reasons). The example in the article proper is in a Portuguese subtitle, but now that you pointed me at it and I did check the Reddit thread... well, that text is not legible in game unless you really try, so yeah, I hadn't read it. I'm guessing that's the only English instance?
The examples people found include a monitor showing random technical text that someone asked a LLM to write (presumably the writer who goofed is getting paid) and some localized subtitles that were left with a machine localization (the rest of the localization was contracted out).
Even assuming a bunch of other stuff in the game was AI generated and just went undetected, which is likely, if it's all iterations on what people noticed it definitely doesn't fit your description.
I was pointing out elsewhere that I hadn't heard of this guy before today, but Chet Faliszek, who you may know from indie hits like... let's see... Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal 2, seems to not be on board for very similar reasons.
I don't fully agree with either of them, but targeting a specific guy just because he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic interneting, and I don't like it.
Because local servers and plugs aren't the same thing.
I think this whole conversation is mixing two types of disagreements and is going to end poorly for that reason.
One disagreement is technical: can developers provide communities with a safe, functional iteration of their servers to deploy freely in such a way that discontinued games continue to operate?
The answer is "probably not". The devs speaking out aren't wrong about this. This requires rebuilding the entire concept of server architecture for games and centralized servers. Not only are older games probably unsalvageable for that process, but any game that is buying online services would be priced out and you'd end up with only the largest publishers being able to afford basic features like, say, matchmaking.
The other is of design philosophy: is it okay for live service games to exist in their current form, where they run for a bit of time and then, at the sole discretion of the IP owners, they go away with no recourse to ever run them again in any form, ever. Are we cool with that?
I am not. Some of these devs seem to be. I mean, they'd love if there was an alternative, but if the choice is between getting to have MMOs and quirky massive shooters they would rather keep the space deregulated and creatively available than restrict it.
The first one isn't much of a matter of opinion, but there are intermediate steps that can be taken. But because a bunch of people are disagreeing on the second issue with people who a) know a lot more than they do about the first disagreement, and b) aren't particularly inclined to meet them halfway on the second, we end up with this bit of entrenched online drama where ignorance, activism and disagreement is quickly becoming toxic.
I don't have an answer for this, other than maybe... please stop? That'd be nice.
I think the discussion about preservation of live games and consumer rights in server-based games needs to be had. But it needs to be mature and educated. The more the collapse of this petition turns into shitty, petty arguments full of disingenuous misrepresentations and misinformation (on both sides) the more inclined I am to say let it all die and maybe try again with a better understanding of what's being discussed, from scratch.
Of the two guys in question one seems to be a tiny indie dev making single player games. The other is a hugely established figure working on a multiplayer game, but I'm going to say Faliszek's career isn't particularly contingent on this argument, considering that he's a narrative director, first and foremost.
See, this is kind of the problem we're having. You guys are just... saying stuff.
I don't agree with the ultimate takeaway of either of these guys on this issue, fundamentally, but if you're going to stand here and say that they are arguing against this because they are making money out of some server-disconnection racket then you're going to make me stand here and call bullshit because it just doesn't follow.
And so the drama spiral goes deeper and the internet becomes a little crappier.
Which corpos? These guys are both indies at the moment.
You keep wanting this to be a "us versus them" of big companies vs users and that's not the conversation that's happening here.
But hey, by all means I would love to have Faliszek act as a Valve corporate representative and have the irrational side-taking on the Internet argue itself into a singularity.
I don't disagree. My caveat would be that this can't be a blank check to just pull the plug at will. There are different types of server dependencies and different types of remedies here.
I would consider a time-gated mandatory refund for software that stops working within a certain term. That seems like a significant disincentive for the specific type of thing we're talking about. I'd consider carving exceptions in EU regulation for modding and community server replacements of discontinued software. I'd consider obligations to remove certain server checks (e.g. DRM-only or activation checks) on discontinued software and so on.
You lose some face when you go online with delusions of large GaaS releases suddenly generating some magical portable package that runs on end user hardware, but that doesn't mean there isn't an issue or available solutions. I'm concerned that some of the petty drama is poisoning the well and nobody will take this seriously in a long time because of it, because I do think action is needed and is urgent.
The reason this is a perfect shitstorm of online grief is that you're here really wishing this is some Star Wars scenario where your side is the Rebel Alliance and on the other side there's a bunch of developers going "That's not how the Force works!".
You can't boil down a complex technical and legal issue to "it's consumer vs corporation" and hope that magically makes servers portable or implementation feasible. And you can't lump people who know what they're talking about and aren't part of a particularly large corporation with your good guys vs bad guys fantasy just because they disagree with you on the issues.
I disagree. I care about preserving multiplayer games.
DRM servers going down is a thing and I think we can all agree that it should be regulated. In practice it exists in that grey area where Youtube also lives where... yeah, sure, cracking it is not technically legal but nobody is going to enforce that so if you want to play it you bypass the DRM and go on with your day.
But I do care about keeping some version of those multiplayer games. It's a massive loss not seen in media since the early days of television to have a massive cultural artifact just poof itself out of existence at regular intervals. We need a solution to that.
If what this argument is about is just forcing people to keep their activation and authentication servers online or removing DRM then it's been a pointless argument.
It's not what the petition says, not what the advocates for the movement are talking about and not the core of the issue, though. The Crew, which started the entire argument, wasn't a single player game with discontinued DRM, it was talking to centralized servers all along. The Matrix's MMO or Vanilla WoW before that became a commercial product did not fit the bill here, and yet were the things we all think about when we think about this issue.
I'm sorry to say that I have not and will not be attending that TED Talk. I've already done way more homework for this piece of online drama than anybody should, I'm not reading, dismantling and responding to an essay this fine evening.
At a glance, while I do agree that Faliszek is deliberately ignoring some elements of the argument, but I saw the whole video. The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.
This wall of text seems to just go back to the usual talking points of "in my day servers didn't need matchmaking" and "let F2P die", at which point it's just resetting the argument loop, in that the other side of the argument just goes "but I like F2P games", and we're back to the start.
I'm gonna be straight with you, I'm not gonna want to actually read what you wrote some other time.
Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don't think it's impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server. I think it's not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users. Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally. I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several? Who's handling how to point the client at the right place? Who's responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information? How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?
Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated and I'm sure your perfect blend of experience and education is very aware of all that, has memorized the PnL of a dozen different live service games, is aware of all the costs and has accounted for all those wrinkles. For all I know it's all in that manifesto, I'm not gonna check. Ultimately if your rant ends up with "maybe F2P live service games SHOULD die" the argument isn't technical and it's not fundamentally about preservation.
OK, so you're now hosting the post-support servers for Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045, the briefly popular collectible monster card game.
Where do I make an account? Does my old account work? Did you get all my personal info along with the game code to make that happen? Where are you storing my passwords? How are you linking my account to the first party account I used to buy the game? Who do I send a letter to exercise my access rights according to GDPR? In fact, are you GDPR-compliant? How do you know? How do I know? Who is running moderation on the chat? Are bans issued and enforced? Who is to blame if there are legal ramifications from something related to moderation? If I want to buy a skin for the game's popular Electric Squirrel mascot and my transaction doesn't work, where do I get a refund? If you don't handle MTX in your private server, then who makes the code changes to allow players to just buy everything without MTX or to not allow things to be bought? I mean, the entire game is built on collecting Monster Cards, so if everybody has everything it's gonna get weird. Are you rebalancing the game as part of this process or nah? Hey, there is no seasonal content in the game and it feels broken. Can you re-run some old seasons? Who decides which ones? Do you even have the right content server data for that? Where are you storing my inventory and the data for my Electric Squirrel Home Building feature? Are you paying for the server costs of doing that? What happens to my data if you run out of money the way the original developer did? Hey, I also want to run a server, but the entire thing is supposed to matchmake globally and cross-platform, so who says you're the official host of the game now? Why can't I run it instead?
Dedicated servers are more or less trivial, it's not about having a rack of 5090s. Plenty of games with small servers rent those out or let people self-host them, from Minecraft to Conan.
The problem is running a service.
That's why this is so hard. Multiplayer games revolving around standalone matches are whatever, but modern GaaS stuff is... fundamentally not that. Running the game and making the game are not that different from each other, and running the game gets expensive. As in, making-the-game expensive.
We need a solution so that enterprising communities can at least try to work around all those issues without getting immediately shot down by IP holders, and we need a solution to preserve this type of fleeting, fungible media in some form. I just don't know what that is, and I'm pretty sure it's not a one-size-fits-all thing that maintains the game you paid for running as if the servers hadn't been taken down. I just don't see how you set that up as a general rule that everybody can just comply with.
EDIT: Oh, holy crap, I could have saved myself the fantasy scenario. Turns out Faliszek went ahead and broke down exactly what it took to do this for their game. Because they did do it, despite him being actively hostile to this initiative.
I'm gonna pat myself in the back a bit for having caught a lot of the actual pitfalls he describes, but I still recommend giving it a watch. It's not an angry video, it's super informative and well worth the time.
Understandable. You can ignore the big blurb (or go watch Chet's much better version, which is also half an hour, but still). The point is that's just me rattling off the top of my head all the complications I can think of for a modern game.
The thing is yes, you are talking about running a service. Because that's what a bunch of these games are. That's what The Crew was, at least if you ask Ubisoft.
And if you're regulating this issue you can't say "let them do the complicated thing we can't salvage". Everybody is going to have to comply with the requirements, big and small.
So it's one thing to carve out exceptions for community servers for an MMO, it's another to set requirements on sunsetting server-based games by law (Minecraft doesn't count, it doesn't have matchmaking and was always local-hosted).
The world you're imagining is a world where Ubisoft still has The Crew 2 and Activision still has WoW, but Lethal Company or Among Us maybe don't get made. Because if the requirements for both are the same the percentage of their budget compliance takes is massively different.
That's the problem with this on paper, right? You can't target just one scenario that pissed you off. Laws are for everybody. You need to find a solution where you define your terms well enough to ensure that a) you get the outcome you want from the big boys, and b) the small fry and the edge cases don't get tossed with the bathwater.
But again, it's not just a technical issue. It's cost and functionality and compliance and legal requirements, too.
Also, eff no, it IS complicated. And expensive. You're handwaving a ton of stuff there, it's not just some Oracle DB.
And again, you're not saying "can we do it", you're saying "can we make it mandatory to do it for everything?"
At this point you have to go back to the big blurb you didn't read or the video you didn't watch. It's the specifics of what you need to do. At scale. For every live game, so like 80% of the mobile industry, a decent chunk of console and PC.
And each of those has a litany of technical, legal and financial requirements, each different from each other, by design.
You can't just write into a law that it needs to happen and have it magically materialize. That's not how this is going to work, even if the inititative succeeded.
No, I'm just unwilling to engage in the complexity on your terms. Which is to say, I'm not going to parse several pages of line-by-line forum bickering for the sake of your verbal incontinence.
You can choose a subject and we can talk about that subject, or you can keep it legible with an overall argument.
But you are not interesting enough for me to spend my day reading your manifesto.
That does not seem to be accurate in Faliszek's case. He did not "take his first steps into trying to make an indie game", he led the studio that did make it, led development on the game and then proceeded to go through the exact process we're discussing to make it community-runnable.
He has DEFINITELY seen the code needed to run the server architecture, if the 30 minute video breaking down the process of decoupling the game from central servers he posted today is any indication (which I did watch, including the parts that are about organic farming, because Chet actually IS interesting enough for me to spend my day checking out his manifesto).
He hasn't been with Valve for a while. His last game was The Anacrusis, an indie game from a studio he founded. It launched, it bombed and it got converted to a community edition. I guess you not knowing it exists explains why that happened.
He is perhaps the most specific example of what this petition would require in the industry I can think of. Along with KO City, which also converted their game from third party published paid to free to play and then to a community server edition.
Well, no, he specifically considers a future without Steam and acknowledges ongoing support for the game is dependent on Steam for matchmaking.
Because matchmaking is a central service.
And the reason he wants to keep all these dumb features nobody wants like matchmaking and cross-play and... you know, unlockables, is that he sold the game with them and doesn't want to take them away from players when they continue to support the game as a community.
I don't know, that seems reasonable to me.
The story he's telling you is precisely "developers figuring it out". Of course he'd want to still have cross play. Of course he still wants matchmaking. He made the game, that's the point.
And his game is pretty easy to fix, all things considered. It's a Left4Dead-like, you only need a handful of people in a session that can run over P2P. Expand what he's describing to peristent worlds with hundreds of people, seamless matchmaking and microtransactions and you have a very complex web to tangle. A web that, by definition, you can't afford. Because if it made money you wouldn't be taking it down.
And again, neither Faliszek nor me are saying we don't want games preserved. I'm saying that wishing really hard for games to keep working doesn't make them keep working. You HAVE to fix all the legal and technical issues. That's the job.
I was being sarcastic, those aren't indie hits, they are genre-making, classic games that define multiple generations of gaming. The guy is a massive part of gaming history.
Also not just a writer. You can go find elsewhere in the thread where I link to him breaking down a number of technical issues in the process of migrating Anacrusis from dedicated central servers to the peer-to-peer community edition. I'm not surprised. Not only did he start the studio, but he's a Valve vet, their whole thing is horizontal working.
I'm also not surprised because most designers, producers or creative directors working in an online game like TF2, Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead would be pretty savvy about networking issues, the same way most screenwriters can understand how a movie is shot.
No, that's the migration to EoL. He talks through the difference in very articulate ways. Specifically, it's the transition from those features being centralized to them being handled without their support. So the game goes from a central server to peer-to-peer, matchmaking goes from their service to the Steam API for it and so on.
That's what end of life looks like if you need to keep the game running, The game won't run without matchmaking, so you need a matchmaking solution. They went with this. They could have gone with a server browser. One thing wouldn't necessarily be less work than the other, the idea is they had to reimplement that chunk of the game in a way the community could maintain.
If you just put the game out and don't enable some solution for matchmaking then there's no matchmaking and you can only play by yourself.
If you're frustrated that this is done with such complications imagine how it feels for the people doing this on the way to a certain layoff or bankrupcy. Which is the whole point people are trying to impress here.
You are wrong. A corporate entity will always provide some service under any version of "SKG".
I guess you could make it so it doesn't, but then all console games are excluded (since they all use some central first party API), all Steam games are excluded for the same reason and you'd be forcing developers to build their own substitutes for everything from hosting platforms to login platforms.
I suspect you're misunderstanding what some of the stuff means or you're visualizing something that just doesn't fit how online games are built. Are you picturing a situation where no third parties are providing anything at all? No Steamworks, no Xbox Live, no servers of any kind hosted anywhere? Because that can't be the requirement, unless you want to make every game since Quake 3 illegal.
You are factually wrong about that. A whole bunch of running an online game is dependent on the platform, depending on how you're running it.
If you built a game without cross-play and are relying on the first party for some of the online functionality, then making it work outside of it is extra effort. And even if that third party service isn't Xbox or Steam it is very likely to be a third party service like Pragma or whatever, so it's still something you'd have to replace.
So no, most of your Xbox games won't work if you remove all traces of Xbox Live. That's not how this works. And if your answer for future games is for it to be illegal to buy third party networking tools then your plan isn't going to work, either.
But also, it's not what's being proposed in the first place. This Ross guy even assumes it won't work like that explicitly. His argument is that third party providers would change to comply. Which... maybe? But then you're just moving the problem around. How would they change to comply? Who handles their costs when a client drops support? That's not how any of this works, their services aren't free for a reason, you can't just have them continue to provide them for free to every client by law.
Yeeeah, you haven't worked in gaming at all, have you?
I mean, I believe that you've been paid to code at some point and I'm hoping you're not just being a dick on the Internet for sport, but man, all these I'm-such-a-competent-software-engineer rants are not giving you the authority brownie points you think they are.
Whatever, if you know you know. I'm not interested. Just... in the off-chance anybody here reads this far down this thread, couple of things: one, stop it, what are you doing. Two, this is not what a person that knows what they're talking about sounds like. He'll try to tell you it is, but it is really not.
Dude I have never been or wanted to be a "seasoned senior software engineer". I mean, respect to them, can't get things going without them, but I don't think of that as an aspirational badge of honor thing.
Also, I'm shocked to find I've been mirroring your "rethorical approach". You really do overestimate how much of your posts I've been reading, because I could not tell you what that is. Is the "approach" to wonder if your callousness comes from not having first hand experience? Because let me tell you, I got there all on my own.
Anyway, it's good that we both find each other's opinion entirely irrelevant, because I sure have better things to do and not enough self-control to do them instead of this. Toodles indeed.
Loving the new Dune game so far. Impressed by the graphics and details 😊 Highly recommend if you like the Dune story. Hope they manage to tweak close combat though, it could be better.
I think maybe I'm spoiled by the movies, but... I kind of hate it? I hate all the ways they had to cherry pick Dune stuff to turn it into a survival crafting MMO like Conan, especially in the parts where the lore fits worse than Conan. And the story is extremely videogamey. I think the new films are already a bit overly literal when it comes to choosing between the politics and the psychedelia, but man, does Dune Awakening do videogame-ass videogame dream sequences.
The disconnected, patchy reality of the original Cryo Dune got to the right feel accidentally, but there's something to seeing the setting reduced to a skin over Conan Exiles that seriously rubs me the wrong way.
That is a bit surprising, because I have used a Legion Go (non S) with both Windows and Bazzite and performance seemed pretty comparable across both. I certainly didn't notice double the battery life at any point. Maybe I just didn't bench the same set of games, this seems very specifically to yield best results on CDPR games. Or maybe it's because these benches are just for the Z2 and not the Z1 Extreme version, and this is very specific to that chip.
It could also be the memory management/config is different on the SteamOS side and some games are getting different amounts of VRAM across OSs? How do these stack up to Bazzite on the same hardware? Is there an advantage to brand name SteamOS?
I want to see more benchmarks from more people with more configs. Everybody in the tech industry is busy fawning over overengineered fans over in Computex and this actually interesting release isn't getting the right amount of coverage.
On the Deck itself there are APU customizations at play, but not here. I don't know that the underlying OSs are fundamentally different. I know one is arch and the other is Fedora, but they're both immutable distros and should mostly be running the same things when launching in game mode.
For battery life it could just be a configuration difference in how the benchmarks were run on both OSs, or even down to the manufacturer software. Benchmarking hardware is hard, what can I say. I can say Dave2D isn't great at it, which I suppose is not the point of his channel, but I certainly wish some of the more technical channels weren't distracted right now, because there's an interesting three-way comp to be had here and some digging into interesting things.
That may be legitimate if the Windows settings are the factory settings. That's why I was pointing at memory management, because if you have a 32 GB device and you're assigning 3GB to VRam while the SteamOS version does something different things may get funky results in some games, especially running at higher resolutions and so on.
So it's entirely possible that the out-of-the-box setup of these machines on Windows and SteamOS are legitimately that different but that a better Windows config would mitigate it, which is still bad for something sold with a preinstalled Windows image, for the record. Or maybe the overhead of Win11 is just that big, I don't know. Would certainly love to see someone look into it.
I can tell you that bumping the default VRAM allocation on Windows handhelds has taken some AAA games from unplayable to quite solid in my experimentation, but I'm not gonna sit here swapping OSs and games back and forth for benchmarks. At least not for free.
Narratively it goes off the rails and it has some pacing and balance issues as well, but it's still a great game.
And how refreshing is it to see a great looking RPG that doesn't feel the need to be an action game? Maybe they can convince Square to stop making crappy button mashers and go back to making good to great turn based games for all those cool combat animations.
Whenever I hear the Ubisoft narrative I feel nothing but boiling wrath for all the people who chose to not play the two Prince of Persia 2D platformers they made. I am thoroughly bored of their open world fare, but it's astonishing how reliably their most creative, better games are their worst performers.
I get that Steam is where everything and everyone is at. And that the user experience and functionality is best there BUT having another player to try an compete with Steam is a good thing, right?...
So I learned recently that GOG actively funds Heroic. Which really takes some weight off of Heroic's support for GOG game autopatching and cloud saves, meaning it may be a bit hacky and officially in "beta", but it's very unlikely for GOG to object to its presence.
They may not "officially" support Linux, but they don't "explicitly" lack support.
Also, tip of the hat to Heroic, it works extremely well and very reliably. I was frustrated with Lutris and I am bummed out by how Galaxy didn't quite get there as the one universal support launcher to handle all your libraries, but Heroic is good enough as a replacement I don't mind nearly as much anymore. Even on Windows I'd consider it over Galaxy.
I don't root for any rich guy over another, but I do think competition is the best way you're going to keep them in check for a commodity market with little regulation, at least.
On that front the cultish adoration of Newell and all the actively rooting for a Steam PC gaming monopoly is... worrying.
While I'd like to see more advanced features in other launchers (or, ideally, at the OS level in both Windows and Linux), I don't think it's realistic to expect new competitors to get to that level of support with 80% of the market fossilized around Steam.
They have a twenty year head start and a ridiculously dominant position. You're not going to get a proprietary controller translation layer or a full on video capture software right off the bat. It makes sense to focus investment on getting content first, since Steam gets all content by default by having an iron grip on the marketplace, and for business reasons other launchers prioritize multiplayer features first.
Gog, then? Itch? I'm not even going to try with Microsoft or the publisher stores because people were so mad at them they effectively killed them.
Turns out nobody is competitive in any way against Steam, which seems to be the whole problem of lacking competition and having a single player dominating a market.
Yep. As I understand it it's via affiliate links, so if you buy GOG games through the storefront in the Heroic UI they get a small cut, but the Heroic devs say they have spoken to GOG reps and they are broadly supportive, so unless that changes I don't think their ability to support GOG features would be compromised any time soon.
To be clear, I'd agree that the prioritization by a bunch of competitors has been wonky, but Steam ONLY does client. They are a very lean company that actively builds stuff to be hands-off and has stepped away from focusing heavily on game development for a while.
Could Epic invest more heavily in their client as opposed to spending all that money on giving away free games and acquiring content? I bet. I also bet if they looked at GoG building a whole interoperable client and getting nothing in return or some of the work EA wasted on their version (twice!) for also nothing in return, then prioritizing redundant features that Microsoft provides at the OS level seems like a worse investment. Particularly when the store loses money and they could be spending that on Fortnite content or Unreal features or whatever else.
Steam is a weird outlier in that their ultimate goal has been to ditch Windows/MS for a while, so their whole consolized controller-based UI, the controller layer, the background recording, the overengineered chat all make sense in the context of SteamOS having been in development for a decade. For everybody else it's a leap of faith.
Do I think it would have been a better choice for Epic? If it was up to me I'd have given it a shot, I think. But let me be clear: I'd have done that in the understanding that the minute you match a Steam feature the cult of Gaben shall move on to a different shortcoming as the justification for their adhesion. When Steam was behind on their refund policy nobody raged against them and nobody stopped raging against EA Origin depite offering no-questions-asked refunds. Now you hear about it as a differentiator. When Epic didn't have a perisistent shopping cart that was the dealbreaker for a while, when they implemented it's their store design or the library paging or whatever. Nobody complains about games only being available on Steam when they aren't elsewhere, but Epic exclusives are a travesty. This is not about the feature set or policy.
But starting to match the feature set at least would take a talking point off the table and offer a selling point.
Did I give your trolly post way too much credit and took it too seriously? Yes. Is that an apt metaphor for this entire conversation? Absolutely.
I'm not "defending" anybody. I'm not taking sides at all. The only reason I even jump into these is that the absolutely cult-like zeal grown-ass men deploy in defending large corporations over each other is both some Sega-vs-Nintendo console war crap I wish we could get over and not particularly good if you want a PC market not dominated by a single player.
I don't know what percentage of the Epic Store's funding goes to feature work versus other areas. I can guess Epic is investing very heavily on content, and I can guess that's because it'd be really hard to meet Steam on content when every developer of any size is effectively forced to be on Steam first and everything else if and when. I don't know how much funding that leaves for client development.
Like I said, I'd probably have refocused on client features a bit further, but I'll also acknowledge they probably wouldn't see that much tangible return from that investment, given that Steam fanboys already don't give them enough credit for the very noticeable improvements they've actually made and they have no effective means to run PR against Steam.
Hell, if you look at it objectively they'd probably be better off focusing on their legal fights with Apple and Google and on having a decent mobile client, which Steam very much doesn't. Maybe there's a path forward there. I don't have enough of an inside view to know.
Well, for one thing the "GoG doesn't support Linux" narrative runs strong (I believe it made at least one appearance in this thread), so there is that.
For another, GoG doesn't get the same hate for the same reason in Sega vs Nintendo the Turbografx or the Neo Geo didn't get the same hate. They are simply not in the same race.
Ubisoft's platform does get the hate, though. And EA's. And Acti/Blizzard's. And Microsoft's. Gamers love a good narrative, though, so EGS took over when Origin stopped being the bad guy du jour. Ubi had a brief period in the spotlight, though.
So after some soul searching I'm going to say I absolutely don't have a rage boner for Steam (considering my Steam library is in the thousands and I own both iterations of the Steam Deck and a Vive that'd be a very confused boner anyway).
I would really love to kill some time on my phone. The games I have tried include: Slay the spire, shattered pixel dungeon, unciv, dead cells. Other than that, are there any solid phone games or otherwise ports, paid or not?
Man, I'm replying to you just to entice you to come back and re-read this thread. Just for your own good, in case you were the first one to post for some reason.
Discoverability is crappier on mobile stores, but there's no shortage of good games. I mean, it depends on good for what and what types of experiences you're looking for, but the content absolutely is there.
'Spitting in the face of your international audience': The Alters cops to using generative AI for background text and translations, despite not disclosing such on Steam (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
In a statement, 11-Bit Studios confirms that an instance of AI-generated text appears in The Alters due to an “internal oversight”...
Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content (fedia.io) angielski
Dune game angielski
Loving the new Dune game so far. Impressed by the graphics and details 😊 Highly recommend if you like the Dune story. Hope they manage to tweak close combat though, it could be better.
SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Surpasses 3.3 Million Copies in 33 Days (insider-gaming.com) angielski
I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store? angielski
I get that Steam is where everything and everyone is at. And that the user experience and functionality is best there BUT having another player to try an compete with Steam is a good thing, right?...
Any good mobile games? angielski
I would really love to kill some time on my phone. The games I have tried include: Slay the spire, shattered pixel dungeon, unciv, dead cells. Other than that, are there any solid phone games or otherwise ports, paid or not?