sugar_in_your_tea

sugar_in_your_tea, 14 godzin temu

Yup. I use AI when I need a “good enough” result. I do it myself when I need an actually good and provably correct result.

sugar_in_your_tea, 8 dni temu

I find them really valuable. Before buying a game, I’ll skim 10 or so reviews, both positive and negative, to find what it’s good and bad at. If the negative reviews are all stuff I don’t care about and the positive reviews excite me, I’ll probably get it. But if the negative reviews consistently mention something that’ll bother me, I’ll pass.

sugar_in_your_tea, 10 dni temu

Yeah, Magic Carpet rocked. I’d love a game like that with MP.

sugar_in_your_tea, 11 dni temu

I just don’t buy games that have features I don’t like. I don’t pirate them, I just don’t play them.

Most of my money goes to indies because they don’t pull this BS. I’ll play the occasional AAA game if it’s worth it, but not many.

sugar_in_your_tea, 11 dni temu

I have no idea how Steam’s forums work since I only go there if I can’t find a solution to an issue elsewhere, but for that use case it’s totally fine?

GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement.

Isn’t that kind of what you want from a distributor? Looking up “Gabe Newell political views,” the top results were about him refusing to ban games, partly to avoid the Streisand effect, but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship. If Valve banned things based on company views, they’d quickly be at risk of an antitrust lawsuit.

I personally agree that Valve shouldn’t be involved in the forums. But I do think the publisher should be able to take over moderation if they so choose. Maybe that’s a thing, idk, I don’t know very much about the forums.

I do a quick skim of the review scores and get it

I’m the same way. I skim the first ten or so reviews, skipping low effort (one sentence) and try-hard (massive checklists and essays) reviews, and try to find a negative review or two. I’m looking for what the game is good and bad at to see if it likely justifies the price.

sugar_in_your_tea, 11 dni temu

Okay, so unwritten rule that you can’t sell games about murdering actual human beings.

I assume those would be illegal, which seems to be the metric Valve uses when deciding whether to ban something. That means you could have different bans based on region, so China will have different bans than the UK, which will have different bans than Russia.

Which is what the steam forums ARE.

Which is why publishers should be able to take over moderation if they don’t like how the community is acting. I don’t know if that’s the case, because the only time I go to the forums is from an internet search looking for a fix to a specific issue. I don’t see 99% of the nonsense here, nor do I know how moderation happens (or doesn’t happen).

Libertarianism isn’t about leaving things alone, it’s about protecting rights. Valve has every right to moderate, but if was a government, it would not, outside of speech likely to directly incite violence (e.g. planning an assassination or terrorist attack) due to the right to free speech. It seems GabeN is holding Valve to theore strict standard of a government than the looser standard of a private company.

If Valve sees the platform as similar to a government, it should see a game-specific forum as a private space controlled by the publisher. If the publisher doesn’t want to take that responsibility, they can leave it up to Valve’s standard.

I think the hands off position is correct, provided the publisher can take over moderation. Players can choose with their wallet and their engagement and decide whether to buy a game or engage with the forums based on its community moderation.

Steam has a lot of value to me partly because there’s a ton of stuff there I find distasteful, which makes me feel like there’s a better chance things I like that others don’t will be allowed on the store. If a game isn’t on the store, that’s because the publisher didn’t publish it there, not because Valve blocked it. Platforms like Steam shouldn’t be opinionated, they should be as inclusive as possible, and that includes criticism of public figures the platform may like.

sugar_in_your_tea, 11 dni temu

At the end of the day, it is Valve’s house. If there is a room full of nazis then clearly they are okay with it. End of story.

Would you rather Valve, with their dominant market position, be opinionated about what games and speech they allow? Or would you rather they act more like a public market, where publishers decide what is allowed in their corner of the market? Does this preference change depending on whether they align with you?

If a publisher wants to attract Nazis, let 'em. If they want to attract leftist extremists, let 'em. If a publisher wants to discourage all forms of extremism according to their own opinion of what “acceptable” means, let 'em. But the choice should be for the publisher to make, not the platform, especially if that platform has a dominant position.

sugar_in_your_tea, 16 dni temu

Sell the IP.

sugar_in_your_tea, 18 dni temu

Really? They had some bangers in the 90s, such as Road Rash and Need for Speed, as well as a ton of great games they published, like Sim City. Even their sports games were generally great.

It wasn’t really until the 2000s and 2010s that their games became money grabs.

sugar_in_your_tea, 18 dni temu

Can confirm, my neighbor makes indie films, and I don’t live in Hollywood or anything, just a random town in Utah. There are more than you and I expect.

sugar_in_your_tea, 18 dni temu

I disagree. The PC gaming market is about $76.67B. That’s ~$4M for each of the 18,626 games, most of which are asset flip crap. Many of the remainder are by indie devs (generally <30 people). The article mentions about ~10% of those games receive 500 or more Steam reviews, so we’re probably looking at $40M on average person game w/ 500+ reviews (i.e. probably not asset flip crap).

There are only about 20-30 AAA games released every year. The indie game market size is about $5B, and that’s across platforms. Even if that was only for PC games, that’s still 85% going to AAA studios, as in those 20-30 games that get media attention.

We don’t have too many games, we have a problem where too few people buy indie games. The average successful indie studio isn’t making $40M per game, it’s likely much less than that.

sugar_in_your_tea, 18 dni temu

You’re not going to convince the Madden/FIFA/etc group because community is more important than the game itself. The same is true for the big competitive games, since again, community is more important than the game itself.

The rest of the market is massive though, and even the people who only play a handful of games still pick up the occasional game to play on their own.

The solution here, IMO, is a high profile reviewer that focuses on indie games. In fact, we don’t really need reviewers going over AAA games because their marketing departments are already handling it. I want professional reviewers who try hundreds of indie games every year and promote the top 10-20 or so. Indie games are some of my favorite, but finding them is incredibly time consuming.

sugar_in_your_tea, 18 dni temu

only game every year is Assassin’s Creed,

How did they settle on AC? Is that the only game that would ever appeal to them, or did one of their friends introduce them and they got hooked? How many of them played Balatro or Among Us and other “viral” games?

The way to market to these people is to get that one person in a friend group to try something new and sell their friends on it. I used to only play a handful of games too, and back then it was mostly StarCraft and Halo. Then a friend introduced me to FTL, Factorio, and Minecraft (back when the last two launched, not what they are today), and I fell in love with indie games. All it takes sometimes is a single experience to show people what they’re missing.

Second Wind

I took a quick look, and it seems to be a mixed bag of content, from first time experiences with games to meta discussions on what makes parts of games great and interesting. Looking at last dozen or so videos, it’s mostly bigger games like Borderlands, Hollow Knight, and Subnautica. If you play any indie games, you’ll hear about those (and Borderlands isn’t even indie).

I think what I’m looking for is something that goes over the top new games from the last month or something, with deeper dives between those videos.

I’ve found niche games to scratch a certain itch I’ve had just by going to the Steam search and filtering by tags

I’ve done the same, and it’s way more miss than hit. When I finally find a hit, it’s usually a few years old, and is going for a fraction of the launch price.

For any given game, I can usually find a decent review by some random fan on YouTube, but going the other direction is a lot harder.

sugar_in_your_tea, 18 dni temu

How did you lose interest in Assassin’s Creed?

The story went nowhere.

Wishlist

That format looks like exactly what I’m looking for! Thanks!

I didn’t like Yahtzee tries as much, probably because it was like a Let’s Play with banter instead of an actual review.

sugar_in_your_tea, 17 dni temu

Sure. My point is that AAA studios have massive marketing budgets so it’s more likely you’ll consider them than an indie that you night like more. We need a better way for good indies to get noticed.

sugar_in_your_tea, 25 dni temu

I’m the same way. I’ll periodically prune it, but most of the games there have been there over a year. If the game goes on a really good sale, I might get it, but I probably won’t.

sugar_in_your_tea, 25 dni temu

That doesn’t cost them anything

It’s an opportunity cost. What other games would have otherwise shown? If the game isn’t appealing, that’s poor use of ad space and could result in lost sales for another game that would then in its place.

I think it’s the right thing to do, though perhaps the window should’ve been longer, like 3 days. But saying it costs nothing isn’t accurate.

sugar_in_your_tea, 25 dni temu

Really?

I just open the Steam app on my phone periodically. I have over 100 games there, so there’s usually a few on sale on any given day. I have my wishlist set to “discount” so only games on sale are shown, and I check it periodically and buy when a game gets to an interesting price.

I never look at Steam emails.

sugar_in_your_tea, 25 dni temu

Your friends buy you stuff?

Mine exists so I can avoid the front page. I have it filtered to show only discounted games, so when I need a game, there’s almost always something I’m interested in that’s on sale since I have over 100 games on that list.

sugar_in_your_tea, 25 dni temu

You probably opted out years ago. Check your Steam notifications settings.

sugar_in_your_tea, 29 dni temu

Yeah, learn to tie them if you’re going to make it part of your personality.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

We’ll get there, just give it time.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

I live in Utah and have a coworker that was supposed to be there for class tonight. Wild times…

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

I played tons of first person shooters, GTA, etc, and I also have never thrown a punch at anyone.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Hey, dude was a POS but I’ll never condone violence.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

we have the most gun violence

If we look at “intentional homicide rate” (choice of weapon agnostic), the US is 66th and just above Greenland. I think this statistic is better than “gun deaths” since it excludes suicides and accidental deaths and looks at intentional murder.

The number is way higher than it should be, but probably way better than most assume given the news.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

It really doesn’t.

The only legitimate link between violence and video games is that violent people seem to like violent video games. I haven’t seen any compelling evidence of a video game causing someone to kill.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

To be fair, a lot of POC gun violence is gang related, not mental health related, because POC tend to be stuck in poorer areas and resort to gangs to make ends meet. There is certainly white gang violence as well, but there’s also a lot of mental health related crimes that happen to be committed by white people, probably because they have more ready access to guns that the average non-gang affiliated POC.

Games are unrelated to both cases.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Absolutely. There have been so many studies trying to prove a connection and failed. It’s a completely debunked argument.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Because those are separate problems with separate solutions.

If people use guns to kill themselves, will they stop killing themselves if we take the guns away? Maybe some will, if the alternatives take so much more time, but the impact won’t be massive. Instead of making suicide harder, we should be treating the root cause of suicide, which is desperation (i.e. have a decent social safety net) and depression (make mental health resources widely available).

If people get hurt due to gun accidents, I highly doubt they’d be happy if we took their guns away, since that’s like solving traffic deaths by banning cars. The better solution is to improve safety features on guns and teach people gun safety so they can use them safely, or in the car example, we should be improving road design and driving education (and making cars less necessary, but that’s a separate point).

Suicides and gun accidents are certainly interesting statistics, but mixing them with homicides just makes it harder to see what’s going on and arrive at effective solutions.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Idk, I’m not a psychologist, but I have looked at studies on video games and there hasn’t been a causal link between violent video games and IRL violence. You’d think that with so much focus on age ratings and whatnot that we would’ve found something, yet that’s not the case. My understanding is the largest contributing factors are childhood abuse, social groups (esp. anonymous online groups), and bullying. I suppose some of that could happen in video games (i.e. in-game chat), but then it’s not the game itself causing violence, but the interaction w/ other players.

So no, I haven’t seen any evidence that violent video games contribute to anything. The best argument is that people who have violent tendencies tend to play violent video games, but the reverse has little to no evidence.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

If you’re referring to the Kirk shooting, this was before that.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Sure, and sensible things like barriers at bridges makes a ton of sense because doing that doesn’t negatively impact anyone and merely gives people more time to rethink their choice.

That said, even with those safeguards, tons of people kill themselves. I had a friend do it by hanging, others use drugs, and some use cops.

If we look at statistics, the US has 15.6 suicides per 100k, compared to 18.4 in Belgium, 12.9 in Germany, and 16.6 in France (not trying to cherry pick here, please look up the stats yourself). Each of those countries has (largely) banned guns, yet the US’s numbers aren’t all that different, so surely guns aren’t a major contributor here.

What we need is to address the core issues here, such as access to mental health resources, more social interaction, etc. Banning guns isn’t going to meaningfully impact suicide, it’ll just shift the statistics to other methods and maybe delay it a bit. People like easy solutions, and treating the symptoms is very attractive, but it’s not a real solution.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

there’s a very wide middle ground of options between “do nothing” and “take all guns away”. This is not a binarry issue.

Sure.

However, most of the gun-related “solutions” I’ve seen wouldn’t actually solve anything, or there’s very little supporting evidence that they’re actually effective (see this Twitter post by the RAND Corporation, media bias for RAND Corporation).

When it comes to suicide prevention, the most effective solution I’ve seen presented and implemented are red flag laws, yet suicide and mass shooting rates don’t seem particularly impacted by that. It turns out people are really bad at taking advantage of those laws, and there’s always the risk that innocent people get hit as well.

We already have laws in place in most (all?) of the country that, if actually followed, would prevent a lot of these cases (not suicide, but access to guns). You already can’t own guns if you have a felony, if you’re on certain medications, or have a history of mental illness. The problem is that many people don’t actually get officially evaluated for mental health, don’t report medications, etc, so the laws end up missing the very people they’re intended to prevent from getting guns.

And then when we look at suicide statistics, the US isn’t all that different from European countries at 15.6 per 100k, France at 16.6, Germany at 12.9, and Belgium at 18.4 (IIRC, guns are largely banned in those countries). The US is higher than its neighbors (i.e. Canada has 9.4, and Mexico has 7), but I don’t think that’s a smoking gun here since Europe also has a wide range (UK is 9.5 and Spain is 8.7). Guns existing doesn’t seem like a major factor in suicide rates, it just happens to be the most convenient method so it gets used the most. If guns were effectively restricted from suicidal people, the biggest change we’d likely see would be shifting from firearms to other methods of suicide, not a significant drop in overall suicide rates (though maybe an initial drop due to delayed suicides).

Real solutions here are hard, and banning guns is comparatively easy, but I really don’t think it would actually solve the problem.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

I usually have 10-20 on my PC and Steam Deck. Sometimes I’m not in the mood for the 2-3 games I’m playing through, but one of my favorites sounds fun.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

I’m still surprised when I see 50+ on some indie games.

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Lol, gottem!

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

At least it’s not Obama’s…

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Eh, I voted third party. Why? Because my vote literally doesn’t matter in my state, since Trump took it with >20% margin. Votes only really matter in like 8 states because the rest have enough straight ticket voters to secure the election for one of the candidates. And in those 8 or so states, the misinformation was real, so it’s understandable that many people didn’t know what they were getting with their vote, they just voted based on whatever smear campaign made them hate the other candidate more.

IMO, the fault here lies w/ Kamala Harris for running a mediocre campaign promising the “status quo” when most people wanted real change. If she ran a more interesting campaign with actual plans regular people could understand, maybe she could’ve cut through the noise and reached enough people to win.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Link’s Awakening Remake is super rad, and my second favorite Zelda on Switch (after Skyward Sword).

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

I doubt the revenue from sales to cheaters is that significant compared to the risk of losing players. I think the simplest explanation is that catching cheaters is hard (read: expensive), so they’re happy with catching the most obvious cheaters with off the shelf solutions (i.e. the Pareto principle).

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

I refuse to play them. If they want kernel level anticheat, they can submit the source under the GPL to the Linux kernel devs for consideration, because that’s the only way I’d consider using it. No game is worth compromising my system’s security.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Yup. I watch MtG Arena draft videos, and they throw hundreds with worth of resources sometimes in a single video, but they’re also making ad revenue and whatnot, so it works out. And viewer numbers are peanuts compared to more mainstream games.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Or more likely, some Karen somewhere saw face cards and complained, and lawmakers/regulators didn’t bother doing any actual research.