Yup. If it’s important enough that devs now have to add a disclaimer on the store page, surely devs shouldn’t be allowed to circumvent that by adding it later. Since SteamDeck customers are affected by this the most, it’s weird that this isn’t already a rule, particularly for games that are SteamDeck verified.
Striking YT channels, expanding their Palworld lawsuit and now this? There’s no denying that they wasn’t always pretty litigious, but they’re picking up speed at an absurd pace. Did recently they hire some of Oracles lawyers or what?
Good thing there’s now enough competition in the handheld market, so I’m no longer reliant on their under-powered devices.
Of course not every game is a certified banger, but there’s more than enough notable games on that list that made an impact on the industry and should’ve been preserved for that fact alone.
If a game asks for money in any kind of way: Yes. That should be the cost of (trying to do) business.
Alternatively, a full refund for everyone involved, even Kickstarter backers, would also be acceptable.
The other answer from @ampseandrew already covers most points, so I’ll just a few things:
Most game servers out there are already built in a way to allow for easy deployment. After all, devs have to have way to test changes, so being able to run a small server locally for debugging purposes is hugely beneficial to development.
I also can’t imagine that there’s any game server out there that shouldn’t be able to run on a single system. The heaviest one game I can imagine is Minecraft, due to the whole open world terrain generation, world streaming and physics calculations, and even that can be run off a Raspberry Pi for a small number of players.
That’s just blatantly false. People bought the founders pack were never refunded for example. Those people being entitled to the server software or a refund is anything but greedy, even if that only applies to a single person.
If they can play against bots, which already exist in the game, or band enough people together with access to the game to play on a server one player is able to host, then yes. That’s what I’d expect at a minimum.
If they want to keep some form of DRM then that’s not my job to figure out. This wasn’t a problem back in the day when server software being distributed was the norm, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.
Though personally I’d be in favor of abolishing online DRM entirely, but that’s another story.
At least try to make an effort to understand what I write.
I said it’s their job to figure out how to do DRM -if- they want DRM. If they can’t figure out how to do that then the answer shouldn’t need to be spelled out explicitly: No DRM. Simple as that.
If you’d rather see games you spent money on being taken away from you based on the whims of corporations, just to make sure others who might not have payed for it also can’t play it, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Yes, you’re just explaining regular piracy here. I do not care. It’s a thing that’s already been possible for almost every single-player game in existence, and yet, there’s a constant stream of new single-player games releasing every day. Weird, right?
At this point I’d that say getting enough individual countries is almost inevitable in the process of getting 1M signatures. If the distribution between countries remains as it is, every country with more than 25% right now would reach the threshold by the end.
Seems to me like the individual country threshold is only added to prevent initiatives getting single-handedly pushed by a single big country and never be the blocker for regular initiatives.
So yeah, the best strategy would most likely be to keep pushing the big countries: Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Speaking of Italy, what’s up with them? Only 18%? Those are rookie numbers.
That’s one thing I checked first, but compared to Germany for example, the average age and percentage of people playing video-games is apparently just a few percentage points of difference. Though “people playing video-games” could of course mean anything and I’d wager that the average person playing casual games on their phone might not care as much.
Agree. I don’t know this person, but at best he didn’t understand the campaign and also overdosed on defeatism. At worst he’s intentionally misrepresenting the campaign and lobbying against better consumer rights.
Looking at this map there seems to be at least some correlation. There really needs to be popular advocates for each language and country, particularly for the smaller ones and those with a low english speaking population.
At the very least, a save game editor wouldn’t be too hard to create when running your own server.
Though that got me thinking if there’s some kind of GDPR shenanigans one could already utilize to get all your account data. I kind of doubt it, but it would be hilarious.
It was similar for me, except that Nintendo made the decision for me by prevening me from purchasing (or downloading) any game from the eShop. Of course, it wasn’t entirely unexpected to get banned since I also hacked mine in order to dump my games and transfer saves for games I owned on PC and Switch.
Still, since Nintendo apparently didn’t want to have a customer and the SteamDeck was announced shortly after I jumped ship day one and only turned the Switch on once again to transfer my saves back.
Yeah, I pretty much hopped on it as soon as it was hacked so there wasn’t much knowledge of what could lead to bans. Granted, at that point I was already a bit dissatisfied with the Switch, so I went in fully aware of the risks and not really being afraid of the risk. I even had a preorder running that I got locked out of, though luckily enough, that got a PC port not soon after.
It was the early days of homebrew when there wasn’t much information out there and the tools were much less advanced. I didn’t really care about the risk either, so it could’ve been anything. I wasn’t immediately banned either. Took about half a year or so.
But yeah, emulation can pretty run all the relevant titles, meaning the exclusives, much better than the Switch itself.
I’d have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.
Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you’d be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn’t caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch “real” cheaters.
Yup. At the very least, they shouldn’t have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that’d be more of a game design problem anyway.
That’s true. Personally though, it not being optional for any amount of time just shows that there’s no good argument to have it be mandatory in the first place.
Yup. I’ve always loved having a handheld device as a companion to my PC. The first few months with the Switch were great, but as time went on I just wanted a better designed Switch that’s also just a PC, particularly after getting hardware-banned for trying to fix some of the issues myself with homebrew apps.
I never would’ve thought that we’d actually get to see a device that’s real so quickly (anyone remember the Smach Z?), is actually pretty good and how quickly it’s now becoming its own market segment.
I’m not usually a huge fan of rogue-likes, but I’ve enjoyed a few, like Hades. I bought Balatro last week and have been absolutely smashing it ever since then. I love the way the game works, each run being so different even within the same framework, and the feeling when your build starts to go off is so incredibly...
I just got the (first) completionist achievement after 60 hours plus however many I spent on the demo. I might try a few of the challenges and try to win with the final stake at least once, but after that I think I’m done.
It’s an absolutely amazing game and has secured its place in my deck building hall of fame beside Slay the Spire and Wildfrost.
I’ve been really looking forward to this one since watching the first short clips. Also helps that Pseudoregalia really got me into the mood for some more Metroidvanias recently.
Most games are great because they provide something unique or are polished to perfection, so it’s wild that they’ve made something that manages to be both their first attempt. Really looking forward to whatever they decide to do next.
Penny’s Big Breakaway is a 3D platformer developed by the team behind Sonic Mania. Really looking forward to playing this one, John from Digital Foundry had nothing but glowing praise for it.
Played it a bit so far and the controls are really unique. Definitely needs a lot of learning to get somewhat competent, but also very powerful when mastered. I’d be surprised if this isn’t going to become my favorite platformer of the year.
That said, the tutorial level (1-0) feels rushed. Very confusing pacing and camera transitions as well as bad audio mixing. Thankfully I haven’t seen any of those issues again in any of the proper stages.
A bad voice probably also just feels much better and complete than having no voice at all. At least based on the observations I’ve made when adding sound effects to my games as a hobbyist. A silent game just feels bad.
That article is a bit out of date and wasn’t really true anyway. The people who are creating Pretendo, who wrote the blog post this article is based on, did an update on the situation, specifically calling out the media for their sloppy articles:
With that said, some outlets did a less than stellar job at reporting our last post, not covering some topics fully or accurately.
TL;DR: Many of the issues have already been fixed, even going so far as there are now entirely new servers in place to act as a proxy for Amazons servers to work around some security related incompatibility issues.
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
I’m currently playing one of the games in Last Call BBS: 20th Century Food Court.
For anyone familiar with the Zachtronics catalog of games it’s like someone bolted one of the programming games onto one of their factory games, but the programming part is done using cables. Unsurprisingly, programming with cables gets quite messy, so even after a short break I usually have to restart a puzzle because I don’t recognize what part was supposed to do what anymore.
It’s a great game but that’s indeed one big issue of the game. Most of the game is pretty lenient when it comes to difficulty, but there are a few bosses that come with pretty enormous difficulty spikes. I’d recommend looking up how to power-level when you reach those sections.
Does Playnite have a year in review setting/feature?
Seeing some of the Steam year in review posts here & there made me wonder if Playnite has a feature like this stowed away somewhere. Another more offline app I use for music has it to where you can share an image of your most played music from the past year, so I'd think similar might be possible with Playnite.
It’s not a full-blown ‘Year In Review’ feature, but the ‘Game Activity’ extension does add a lot of interesting stats. Don’t know if it can create those charts retroactively though.
Seems like they won’t release it before it’s in a state where it’ll “just work” on about machine, which makes sense, since that’s the thing that helped the Steam Deck to success.
To that end it’ll probably be a while before they can get there, particularly for machines with NVIDIA GPUs, assuming stuff like multi-monitor VRR and bug-free Wayland support is on the list of requirements.
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
The Talos Principle. I’ve had this game for years, but always bounced off during the second world. Finally stuck with it in anticipation of the sequel. Overall, not as difficult as I imagined, but some puzzles are quite frustrating, either because the solution feels like a bug or because the setup is long and a mistake requires a full reset. Still very enjoyable even though I didn’t care much about the story.
FF7 Remake Intergrade. Not much to say about this one. Very solid DLC and just the right length. Next up: Continuing my playthrough of the original FF7 from where Remake ended.
Cocoon. Probably my favorite game of the year beside Hi-Fi Rush. Really cool main mechanic that’s explored at a very enjoyable pace. All puzzle elements are clearly telegraphed as well and unintentional red herrings get blocked off to avoid confusion. Didn’t really see this game get noticed though, which is a shame.
Played through the first (quite short) chapter today and it’s really promising so far. Really fun combination of movement mechanics, particularly the rope usage, which is something I’ve never seen in any other game.
It’s also quite good looking since it’s one of the first UE5 titles and has some gorgeous lighting and high overall image quality as a result. No issues running the game on Linux either.
So I have been using the Fediverse for some time, Started with Mastodon and Lemmy then moved to Kbin for a mix of both as well as features and have finally ended up on Mbin for the Bug Fixes....
To expand a bit on the user base issue: Even on Reddit with its giant user base a game needs to have a decently sized audience in order to sustain a healthy and active subreddit.
Now, hypothetically speaking, even if this place had a tenth of the user base, it would mean that a game would still need to be 10x bigger in comparison in order to maintain an active community.
For now, only a very, very small handful of games are above that threshold.
I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....
Yup. Ideally there should always some kind of indicator, like a bar, that lets you easily see how many steps there are and which one is selected.
Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there’s one that’s called “highest” or “max” then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
Like, there is an in-universe explanation for why you are solving puzzles.
That observation actually made me go through my library looking for more examples and, yeah, it’s surprisingly few. There’s ‘The Entropy Centre’, which also falls into the “You’re a test subject” category. Other than that there’s the Zachtronics games, where the reason for puzzle-solving is because it’s your work.
I haven’t built a gaming PC for over fifteen years; I defected to PlayStation in '08 when the constant upgrading got too expensive to really justify, but now I’m looking to come crawling back....
Simply going one step down from buying every “halo” product would already do wonders for a significant price/performance increase.
That said, when building a new PC I usually start with the recommendations listed at Logical Increments, which has a neat table sorted by budget. Anything at or above the “Suberb” should give you what you want at 1440p.
I’d also very much recommend a high refresh rate monitor, preferably 1440p, which has either GSYNC or FreeSync with a good variable refresh rate range. It really helps with maintaining a smooth presentation as you aren’t forced to keep your game running at a fixed framerate anymore.
Edit: KingRaptor helped me figure out it’s a bug in steam’s wishlist. It can bundle games without telling you then shows the combined discounted price....
This is just a hunch, but could there be a loophole possible with those promotions where you get a discount, but only if you own another related game? Maybe devs can just add discount for owning a free game and fake a permanent discount that way?
But as OP already said, we’d need a dev who’s already published a game to confirm these kind of theories.
Edit: This comment is probably right and it’s just an automatically applied bundle discount, but there’s a bug in the Wishlist where it shows the combined price of the bundled games. If that’s the case then Valve should really fix this ASAP, since it probably falls under false advertising in some countries, even if it’s a bug.
Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November....
Something I completely missed, due to the insanity that is the runtime fee, is that they’re also getting rid of their Plus subscription.
While Plus never had a bunch of benefits, it was basically the edition for individuals and very small teams who just wanted to get rid of the splash screen. These users would have to use Pro now, which is 5x more expensive at 2040$/year/seat.
The roadmaps over last few years already showed that they don’t really care about indie devs anymore, but now it feels like they’ve become actively hostile.
I was thinking about playing High on Life shortly after the release but I’ve seen a few reviews that depict the game (or maybe just the jokes) as so-so....
When it comes to “classic” comedy, then Hi-Fi Rush is one of the highlights in recent times. Not only are there a lot of jokes in the dialogue that landed for me, all the cutscenes are also loaded with perfectly timed visual gags. Lots of humour hidden in the environment as well.
Other than that, any “serious” game that has a wonky physics engine can accidentally be pretty funny on accident. Slinging around corpses in Dark Souls 1 for example.
Runs great on my 5000 series AMD CPU and 3000 series Nvidia GPU
Just specifying the series doesn’t really say much. Based on that and the release year you could be running a 5600X and RTX3060 or you could be running a 5950X and RTX3090. There’s something like a ~2.5x performance gap between those.
I was initially also a bit surprised by the amount of it, but after thinking about it for a bit, Blizzard seems to have engineered the perfect conditions for this to happen:
Create a massively successful game for PC, which also creates a giant group of people who care about the game.
Make a bunch of bad decisions, which are particularly bad for the existing user base.
Only then release the game on Steam, meaning there are no positive reviews from the launch period and a bunch of disgruntled former players, all of which are allowed to review the game because the game has become F2P.
Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Now if only they could more clearly communicate when games are playable offline.
Ryujinx emulator GitHub repository currently down (gbatemp.net) angielski
Concord is going offline beginning September 6th (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Update: players are now throwing themselves off cliffs to grind xp for the platinum trophy x.com/realradec/status/1831041419756388429
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will end service in Nov 28 - but will transition to a paid offline app angielski
Source about the offline app thing: faq.ac-pocketcamp.com/…/36353725150489-What-is-th…
#StopKillingGames Update: Sweden and Poland pass threshold as initiative reaches 25% angielski
I’m not going to post an update every time a (small) milestone is reached, but i felt this time it was warranted....
#StopKillingGames update: Finland just passed the threshold. angielski
The initiative is at more than 20% of the 1 million signatures necessary....
It’s official: No Nintendo console has lasted as long as Switch without being replaced (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Sony cancelled the PSN account linking requirement for Helldivers 2 (lemmy.world) angielski
Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/14764738...
Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld
Have you ever held a switch? Its long, flat and the controllers suck. Awful dpad and bad sticks....
The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines (forum.paradoxplaza.com) angielski
TL;DR:...
Anyone else addicted to Balatro right now? (www.playbalatro.com) angielski
I’m not usually a huge fan of rogue-likes, but I’ve enjoyed a few, like Hades. I bought Balatro last week and have been absolutely smashing it ever since then. I love the way the game works, each run being so different even within the same framework, and the feeling when your build starts to go off is so incredibly...
ANIMAL WELL - Release Date Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
What are the best indie games you've ever played? angielski
Fantastic titles made by people in their bedrooms.
Penny's Big Breakaway - Available Now (youtu.be) angielski
Penny’s Big Breakaway is a 3D platformer developed by the team behind Sonic Mania. Really looking forward to playing this one, John from Digital Foundry had nothing but glowing praise for it.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Will Have a Character Voiced by Text-to-Speech at Launch - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion (lemmy.world) angielski
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
SteamOS will be coming to other handhelds before you can install it on your PC 'because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck' | PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion (lemmy.world) angielski
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
Jusant has released on Steam (store.steampowered.com) angielski
There needs to be more dedicated Gaming Subs (kbin.run) angielski
So I have been using the Fediverse for some time, Started with Mastodon and Lemmy then moved to Kbin for a mix of both as well as features and have finally ended up on Mbin for the Bug Fixes....
What is something (feature, modes, settings...) you would like to see become a standard in video games? angielski
I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....
The Talos Principle 2 | Demo on Steam Available Now (youtu.be) angielski
Please help me select parts for a "competent" gaming PC
I haven’t built a gaming PC for over fifteen years; I defected to PlayStation in '08 when the constant upgrading got too expensive to really justify, but now I’m looking to come crawling back....
Steam wishlist is buggy and sometimes lies about discounts angielski
Edit: KingRaptor helped me figure out it’s a bug in steam’s wishlist. It can bundle games without telling you then shows the combined discounted price....
Unity plan pricing and packaging updates (blog.unity.com)
Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November....
What are some good funny games/mods out there? angielski
I was thinking about playing High on Life shortly after the release but I’ve seen a few reviews that depict the game (or maybe just the jokes) as so-so....
Todd Howard asked on-air why Bethesda didn't optimise Starfield for PC: 'We did [...] you may need to upgrade your PC' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
You heard him 4090 users, upgrade to a more powerful GPU.
Overwatch 2 is now the #1 of the worst Steam games (feddit.de)
steam250.com/bottom100