I assume it did well if they’re looking to make more in the line, but I LOVED this game for chill podcast and audiobook listening. Pretty curious to see where they’re going with it.
This is one of the few games I keep installed and jump back to just as a chill game that requires no intense planning or strategy. The mechanics are simple, well executed, and easy to pick back up after not playing for a while. So many games have tons of complex mechanics that are fine when you’re playing it, but hard to remember if you haven’t touched it in a while.
Updated: 8/1/2025 4:18 p.m. ET: In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries. They said payment processors rejected Valve’s current guidelines for moderating illegal content on Steam,...
What I see is Mastercard hiding behind their generic rules for processors and being fine with the processors taking unilateral action that could damage their brand.
Mastercard should demand they rescind the decision based on a flawed interpretation of their rules since the content IS NOT ILLEGAL where Steam provides it, or drop those processors entirely due to the brand damage their unilateral decision has caused. If Mastercard lets this sit, that signals that they agree with this decision, regardless of what they say, and they should be treated as such.
It is intentionally vague, because companies want to be able to weasel out of any and all accountability whenever possible.
But Mastercard isn’t off the hook either way even if we accept the rules as they are currently. Before this incident, Mastercard has been starting to censor adult content in general with rules changes. To the point where there was already a petition on the ACLU site about this exact type of censorship.
Mastercard is trying to weasel their way out of this particular instance because they didn’t directly have a hand in this video game situation, even though they clearly would agree with it based on other recent changes. They’re trying to play both sides by assuming that people didn’t know they were already doing these things.
Steam can 100% enter any market they want, especially something entirely digital like online payment processing. That’s pretty closely related to what they do already. They just have to have a reason to want to do so.
Steam makes a reported $3.5 million per employee from commissions alone. Possibly as much at $19 million per head across the board. To put that into perspective, Facebook, one of the most profitable companies on the planet, averages a net income of $780,000 per employee, and Apple at $476,000 per employee.
Steam may not be as large as those companies, but they’re so effectively streamlined. So much of their profits come from existing systems that only need minimal maintenance as opposed to needing to constantly develop new products. It is a well-oiled money printing machine at this point. And nothing they do is based on any sort of speculation bubble threatening to burst at any point.
That’s almost surely a result of how Valve works internally for approving projects. They operate with a flat management structure. With no bosses or managers, the employees themselves choose which projects to work on. The philosophy is that Valve only hires the best, and they should operate at their best doing what they enjoy instead of simply being told what to do.
Every employee at Valve is given the freedom to join whatever project they choose, or to create a new one. They are encouraged to work on what they feel if the most important project to the company and what will have the highest direct impact on their customers.
If the Valve employees wanted to make Half Life 3, they would. At this point the joke is that Valve simply can’t count to three. It feels like they want to keep that joke going more than make another Half Life game. Half Life 1 and 2, them Episode 1 and Episode 2, Portal 1 and Portal 2, Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike 2. Several of these have had other interim releases, especially Counter-Strike, but those were always based on the previous game and not a totally new game from scratch, much like the Half Life Episodes.
I don’t even understand how they give a shit. Seems like the perfect place for shareholders to want them to make as much money as possible, it’s a limited market.
I mean that would save millions and millions of dollars right off the top. Between salary, bonuses and stock were talking hundreds of millions in some cases. Maximum shareholder value increase.
It improved a bit, and then the studio began working on an overhaul internally to provide what the game should have been, sort of No Man’s Sky style… but they were shutdown by Bioware.
There’s a lot of reasons it ended up the way it did, development hell and poor management mostly. Hell, the flight mechanic, which had been added and removed several times in development, was core to the released game, and easily the best part, apparently wasn’t even decided to be a necessary feature until Patrick Soderlund, former head of EA studios, was very disappointed in a demo BioWare had shown in early 2017 that the team decided to add flying back in.
One of the core pillars of the game was essentially added just to impress an executive and keep the development going versus being canceled. Flight like in the game requires the entire map and structure of the game world to be different. If you can fly,. you now need to take advantage of the vertical space, something that simply doesn’t even get considered in most games. A mountain you can climb is not the same as needing to fill in an entire mountain range and canyon region with content.
Played for about 2 hours yesterday and that’s exactly what is happening. The game prevents you from plopping your space right on top of another base but the blocked region around it isn’t very large.
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
There have been so many Creation Engine apologists since Oblivion trying to justify its continued existence through multiple new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, always trying to say that it’s fine. Starfield was the chance to prove that the limitations aren’t actually architectural and that it could be used for a modern game. Clearly that’s not the case. Taking just about any other modern open world RPG to directly compare, Starfield feels like crap in comparison. Hell, even the launch version of Cyberpunk felt better than Starfield.
The graphics aren’t the problem. The Creation Engine is not just graphics, it handles everything about how the game works. How the AI works and responds to events, how NPCs handle tasks even when not actively interacting with the player, etc. Graphics is only one part of a game, and that’s not the source of the issues.
Oblivion Remastered still uses the Gamebryo engine from Oblivion for everything with one exception, Unreal now handles the graphics. That’s why the game is nearly identical to the original in every way except graphics, it is.
No it’s exactly the same, you just notice it more because of the different context of a limited fantasy realm versus open stellar exploration.
Oblivion and Skyrim also have a bunch of procedurally generated content. But it is more easily ignored, because these are dungeons and caves and not numerous planets where you are walking for upwards of 15 minutes or more across open terrain to visit the same dozen locations. And having dozens of loading screens to stitch each small segment together.
Starfield as a concept doesn’t work with the engine, because the engine is incapable of adequately creating an open environment at that level. If it could, they would have given it to us instead of Skyrim in space. We got Skyrim in space because that’s the limit of the engine. Bethesda’s insistence of continuing to use it, and claiming that it’s not an issue, despite the clear deficiencies in the released product, is a slap in the face to every player. It’s the definition of “You’ll take what we give you, and like it”.
My strongest memory of Medal Of Honor is the undercover missions. Flipping the ID badge out over and over again like an idiot because the animation was funny.
I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming...
It’s not even much of a remaster. They just slapped a coat of paint on it.
The Gamebryo/Creation Engine is still there running the game, it just uses Unreal 5 for the graphical elements. And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison.
It’s still the same 20 year old Oblivion under the hood.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but calling it a remaster is a bit disingenuous.
More than a coat of paint. They didn’t actually port the game to Unreal 5, they just used it to make the graphics look better. The modding community could have done this years ago if that’s all they wanted to do. Skyblivion is more of a remaster than this official one.
With all of the resources of the original development and sources, I expect more than the modding community is capable of.
If you’re fine paying $50-60 for what amounts to a community graphical overhaul mod that’s fine. I expect more from an actual developer with access to the source code.
A remaster should be releasing Oblivion with an updated engine and graphics, and bringing in some gameplay enhancements from newer games. Technically this meets those requirements, but only by the bare minimum and all of those can be achieved with community mods for free.
A remake would be completely abandoning the decrepit Gamebryo/Creation Engine that’s clearly dragging all of their games down now, and has been for over a decade, and actually giving us something that doesn’t feel like it came out 20+ years ago.
I love the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time, and the only one I ever bothered to get every achievement for back on the 360. But I won’t accept a half assed remaster for nearly full price just because it’s what Bethesda wants to distract everyone from the fact that Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t coming out anytime soon and they couldn’t just release Skyrim for the 12th time.
Don’t accept paying for mediocre products just because you’re desperate for content.
Up front cost cannot cover the ongoing API costs they must be paying for Google Maps. So either this has to be free and just a front end for the same shit, or they’ll still end up net negative.
Mumblings originally in 2017, job openings at the studio in 2018, officially announced in 2020. October 2022 Andrew Walsh, a senior writer from the Horizon Forbidden West team joined the Fable team. June of 2023 had an in-game trailer.
To be honest, that seems to be a reasonable timeframe, especially given the pandemic in the middle, if you aren’t following the “rush it out the door ASAP, fix it after release, if you ever do” approach.
Probably, but the internet is forever. Definitely for stuff like this. There will be tens of thousands of copies of this in a few hours and it will not disappear anytime soon.
Not really here, this would have been a dummy weight either way since it was the test payload for Falcon Heavy. So *something *was going to be sent up. The Tesla specifically was a publicity stunt, but a similar weight was going into a similar orbit.
The bigger question is why they lost tracking on it in the first place to where they weren’t sure what it was. This wasn’t from any sort of failure, this was a planned and fully successful launch payload into a planned orbit.
SpaceX rockets don’t add Methane to the atmosphere. When you burn something, you’re not adding that thing to the atmosphere, you’re adding byproducts from the combustion, and Methane isn’t one of the byproducts of any rocket fuel.
Starship uses methane as a fuel, but that’s not at all the same thing. Methalox engines are one of the cleanest burning rocket fuels after Hydrolox. When burnt, methane just becomes CO2 and water vapor along with a bit of NOx (Nitrous Oxide, aka laughing gas, aka that boost you see in Fast and the Furious) as well.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are Kerolox (Kerosene, RP-1) engines. RP-1 is basically just a highly refined kerosene. When burnt, it will produce CO2, water vapor, NOx, carbon soot, carbon monoxide (which again mostly becomes CO2) and a little bit of sulfur compounds. The exhaust is nasty but it is not that different from what a normal internal combustion car produces. And even with the large amounts, it is still lower than what cars/trucks/SUVs output to get everyone in your city back and forth to work, the grocery store, and home on a daily basis.
Better fine the US government or NASA for all the Saturn V upper stages that are floating around up there as well. Nearly every Saturn V third stage was sent into an orbit around the sun after the Lunar injection maneuver, they’re all still up there. In fact, they lose track of those and “rediscover” them all the time because. The three-body problem is not fully solvable with our current technology, and the further out you get from initial conditions the less accurate calculations become.
This entire thread is filled with people that know absolutely nothing about Space but the basics modern “media” poorly conveys, but feel the need to comment and display their ignorance proudly just because they hate Musk. It’s quite sad actually for an actual Astronomy community, there’s worse discussion in here than reddit.
Yeah. You might want to look into some other foreign owned companies as well. Tencent owns a metric shit ton of “American” companies for instance, I bet there’s several on that list that would surprise you.
Tencent happen to own large portions of nearly every video game company on the planet to start with, and a ton of other large companies, 600+ of them in fact. Large enough positions to directly affect board decisions if they wanted to. And that assumes overt sudden changes and not more subtle things.
As a person that have played Genshin since the launch. Those are all loot boxes. Just because it’s limited or has a pity system, that doesn’t change the fact. It just limits the results or gives you a guarantee
If you are taking a chance at all to get something from a list of items, as opposed to selecting a specific item to buy, IT IS A LOOT BOX.
The specifics of limits or pity systems, or guarantees after X amount do not matter. The slot machines in Vegas have a fixed and regulated chance to payout as well, it’s still gambling.
I’d say it’s more on how the developers setup their system to utilize (or not utilize) those dynamic capabilities.
The game devs not taking advantage of that properly should be on them. Put the blame where it belongs.Don’t let the devs off the hook just because you want to at least partially blame the MS cloud. Microsoft’s systems CAN handle dynamic loads when setup properly, we see it all the time.
There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts. Having the same parent company means almost nothing, especially when you get to the size of places like Microsoft. The internal bureaucracy can actually make getting things accomplished properly worse. External contracts are usually pretty clear on what’s provided for the payment. Internal processes are often much more blurry, if not completely muddy.
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.
For Xbox, that’s because the PC app is literally copy/pasted from the Xbox console app. Hell, it probably is the same universal app since that was a big Microsoft push to have more apps available on the consoles and Windows Phone.
The worst part is when they DO have a weight. I’ll drop a decent weapon or shield in exchange for that 300th medpack. Never know when you’ll come across a boss enemy that I have built my character very poorly against and just decimates me. Which never happens. But it could. Gotta be prepared.
I can go with that. With one exception, bullet sponge enemies. If I headshot a guy without a helmet, he needs to die. I don’t care what the level difference is. If bullets just do a set amount of damage, and it starts taking a full magazine from a rifle in the head to kill someone, then I better be getting PLENTY of ammo and it better not weigh a damned thing.
the game is Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. I took this while exploring during the main story. I’m in love with the way this game looks graphically. The way the lighting is handled is gorgeous
Blackbird Interactive acquires full ownership of Hardspace: Shipbreaker IP (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
I assume it did well if they’re looking to make more in the line, but I LOVED this game for chill podcast and audiobook listening. Pretty curious to see where they’re going with it.
[Update: Valve Responds] Mastercard Denies Pressuring Steam To Censor 'NSFW' Games (kotaku.com) angielski
Updated: 8/1/2025 4:18 p.m. ET: In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries. They said payment processors rejected Valve’s current guidelines for moderating illegal content on Steam,...
Payment Processors Are Pressuring Major Gaming Vendors to Pull LGBTQ+ and NSFW Titles (www.them.us) angielski
Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors (itch.io) angielski
The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before....
Xbox Producer Recommends Laid Off Workers Should Use AI To 'Help Reduce The Emotional And Cognitive Load That Comes With Job Loss' (aftermath.site) angielski
Anthem is shutting down January 12th (www.gamespot.com)
Dune: Awakening Draws Nearly 100,000 Players On Steam Before Full Release (techcrawlr.com) angielski
Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Medal of honor on the PS1 angielski
What are some of your favorite memories playing this game?
Oblivion remake is... really making it apparent how outdated Bethesda is in its approach to making games angielski
I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming...
GeoGuessr is making its way to Steam next month after almost 12 years of sticking it out as a browser game (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Fable delayed to 2026 (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Very likely will be a launch game for MS’s new handheld console....
NASA Ordered to Remove Anything About 'Women in Leadership' From Its Websites: Report (gizmodo.com) angielski
Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny Remastered - Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
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Friendship is survival in Citizen Sleeper 2 (www.polygon.com) angielski
Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster (www.astronomy.com)
Marvel Snap is banned, just like TikTok (www.theverge.com) angielski
Genshin Impact Game Developer Will be Banned from Selling Lootboxes to Teens Under 16 without Parental Consent, Pay a $20 Million Fine to Settle FTC Charges. (www.ftc.gov) angielski
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's launch has been marred by long load times, server issues and now it has overwhelmingly negative reviews (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
To appease a Steam user's demands for straight representation, Webfishing added a 'Straight' title that costs 9,999 fish bucks (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Starfield's first DLC is one of the worst Bethesda DLCs of all time angielski
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
Nintendo's lawsuit against Palworld isn't just bad for the industry, it's bad for Nintendo (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair, Inc. (www.nintendo.co.jp) angielski
Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic” (arstechnica.com) angielski
Saving it until I need it (lemmy.world) angielski
Day 20 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (lemmy.world) angielski
the game is Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. I took this while exploring during the main story. I’m in love with the way this game looks graphically. The way the lighting is handled is gorgeous