tal

@tal@lemmy.today

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders angielski

Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve’s new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus’s first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve’s engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS....

tal,

I actually think that, while it’s maybe a fun topic for idle conversation…it doesn’t have a huge impact in the way traditional console pricing normally does.

With a traditional console, what the console vendor chooses to do on hardware is what you get. Maybe, as with Microsoft on the Xbox Series X/Series S, you get a high and low end model, but that’s as much choice as you get. All the games are made for that hardware, and whether the platform lives and dies depends on it.

But…that’s not really true of the Steam Machine. It’s just another PC, albeit preconfigured for Steam and HTPC-oriented. If you want to get a lower-end PC or a higher-end PC, you have the option of getting one and plugging it into a TV and running the same games on it and save some money or with a bit more visual bling. The games for PCs are already more or less written to scale up and down with hardware.

And it’s not like Valve’s platform is gonna live or die based on the Steam Machine the way a traditional console generation is, where success of a hardware console is high-stakes for the manufacturer and the players in successfully getting a game library going. I’d guess that it might help Valve make strategic inroads into gaming in the living room. But even if it completely bombs, Valve is gonna keep right on selling games to people to run on PCs (and the Deck) and their huge game library isn’t going anywhere.

tal, (edited )

Dang. The new Steam Controller has a D-pad, buttons, thumbsticks, gyros, and trackpads.

And the thumbsticks are TMR (like Hall effect, but nicer).

As long as it’s comfortable to reach all that stuff, that’s gonna be a new bar for PC game controllers.

EDIT: and grip sensors.

EDIT2: and four haptic feedback motors, two in the trackpads.

tal,
tal,

stressed

I think maybe based on the rest of your comment, you intended to write “addressed”?

tal, (edited )

The steam machine sounds intriguing but there is already a big market for mini PCs and I don’t know if consumers would go out of their way to buy a steam PC box. I’m most skeptical about this one

You might not be the target audience. I’m comfortable building an HTPC and putting an OS and all on it and configuring it, but the benefit of a console is that someone just gets an all-in-one setup that works out-of-box. Well, and that game developers are specifically testing against.

Like, if it weren’t a barrier, you’d probably just have everyone using PCs instead of consoles in their living room. Might open the gates to let console-only folks do Steam.

tal,

I have it off on my phone at the moment because my soft keyboard is enaging in shennanigans, and I will say that I didn’t appreciate how many errors that I make on tiny phone keyboards that it fixes until now. I mean, damned if you do, damned if don’t.

tal,

I’ve seen other people request SteamOS-as-a-general-OS on here too, which also surprised me.

I’m thinking that it’s one of two things:

  • People just want something that they’re sure is easy to use.
  • People want an HTPC-oriented configuration.
tal,

Someone else in here commented on how it took a while for the Deck to come to his country.

I almost asked him, but since you’re the second one…I mean…wouldn’t you be able to just get a Deck or a Steam Machine or whatever from anywhere and use it?

tal,

I think that for running games locally on the Frame, for anything other than games designed specifically to be gentle on a battery — and many games are not, unfortunately — you’re also really going to need to leave it plugged into a powerbank. The internal battery just isn’t that large relative to what the device can draw.

pcgamer.com/…/steam-frame-specs-availability/

The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that’s how much it’ll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.

tal,

That’s the normal mode of operation, but it can apparently also run games locally on thr Frame itself, which I guess gives people a portable — if less powerful — gaming option that they can haul around easily if they want.

tal,

github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

Thanks, but I don’t think that it’ll do it for me. I’ve tried similar packages before, and the problem is that I also want the ability to input a bunch of Unicode characters and use keys in terminal emulators and so forth. Even Anysoft Keyboard, which I’m presently using, is occasionally lacking, and it’s pretty comprehensive. I’ve considered doing a soft keyboard myself, even, but I just can’t work up the will to go develop for Android with Google slowly closing some stuff. I think that my long-run trajectory is to move what I can to a Linux laptop and hope that GNU/Linux phones eventually become a practical alternative to Android.

tal,

Ah, gotcha, so it’s middleman overhead. Thanks.

tal,

depending on their sales expectations they could legit make this a loss leader.

I don’t think they will. The problem is that the hardware is open.

Closed-system console vendors can sell at a loss because if you’ve bought the console and don’t buy games from them for it, you’re going to have limited use of it. It’s maybe an expensive Blu-Ray player or something. Not a sensible purchase. You’re gonna buy games for it.

So they can just crank up the price of games and make their return over time from games.

But if the Steam Machine is sold at a loss, then people will also buy it to use it as a regular mini-PC, and Valve doesn’t make a return from them.

tal,

You could probably put a 400 Wh powerbank in a backpack (search for “power station” on Amazon).

tal,

The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.

I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn’t something that suddenly showed up with social media.

tal,

The marketer in the article — as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort — is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn’t be in business.

tal,

An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that’s meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.

The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.

The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren’t going to like it.

What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:

Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent “was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future,” and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.

“This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way,” Beresnev said. “We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused.”

www.trapplan.com/about-us

Trap Plan by The Numbers

We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok

2023 Trap Plan Founded

$10M+ Sold Games

20+ Clients in 2024

tal,

If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.

They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there’s an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy’s shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.

tal, (edited )

I mean, I would imagine that they may well do that, but there are businesses that buy and sell social accounts. Like, the point is that a legitimate user accrues reputation. I mean, that’s an important element of how humans interact with each other — provide useful information, and I give your opinion more weight and stuff. Social media tends to try to leverage that too. But when someone doesn’t want their account any more for whatever reason, their reputation has value, and so it can be bought and sold.

kagis

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So they could develop their own “fake” accounts. Or they could just buy accounts from real, actual users, step into their skin and acquire their reputation. Or they could buy accounts from people who intentionally try to karma-farm — I imagine that that’s probably its own industry.

EDIT: Oh, sorry, maybe I misunderstood — you were quoting the astroturfing guy, using whatever his meaning was. I have no idea what he calls a “fake account”, and I don’t think that I’d consider him to be incredibly trustworthy in the first place. But he might mean that he doesn’t rely on an army of sockpuppet accounts to upvote his astroturfing, I suppose.

tal,

There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).

kagis

Might be elest.io that I’m remembering.

discuss.jacen.moe/post/862

elest.io/open-source/lemmy

Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy

We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)

We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.

Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)

Looks like there’s another one at least:

www.knthost.com/lemmy

Get Lemmy hosting that works for you

Only $11.25/mo. Risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee

Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.

tal,

I don’t know if (a) it’s real and (b) it’ll be like the original Steam Controller, but if so, the point is that it’s the most-viable mouse alternative that you can have in a gamepad form factor.

If a game can be played with a traditional gamepad, then sure, there are a bunch of good options. But not all games are like that.

The original was useful for someone who wants to play a mouse-based game on the couch.

tal, (edited )

Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.

It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.

Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.

“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”

I think that the problem is that you’re likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.

One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.

We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.

For those of you who enjoy open-world games, how big of a world is too big? angielski

There are already some huge maps out there, Just Cause 2 and 3 both have maps at around 1000km^2^, and those games are beloved by their players. But if the next Cyberpunk game was announced with Night City now being the size of an actual large metropolis, say like New York, would you say that’s too big? What determines what...

tal,

I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.

But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:

  • More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.
  • More missions on existing map.
  • More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.
  • A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.
  • The city changing more over time and in response to game events.
tal, (edited )

Take-Two’s CEO doesn’t think a Grand Theft Auto built with AI would be very good | VGC

Sounds fair to me, at least for near-term AI. A lot of the stuff that I think GTA does well doesn’t map all that well to what we can do very well with generative AI today (and that’s true for a lot of genres).

He added: “Anything that involves backward-looking data compute and LLMs, AI is really good for, and that and that applies to lots of things that we do at Take-Two. Anything that isn’t attached to that, it’s going to be really, really bad at…. there is no creativity that can exist, by definition, in any AI model, because it is data driven.”

To make a statement about any AI seems overly strong. This feels a little like a reformed “can machines think?” question. The human mind is also data-driven; we learn about the world, then create new content based on that. We have more sophisticated mechanisms for synthesizing new data from our memories than present LLMs do. But I’m not sure that those mechanisms need be all that much more complicated, or that one really requires human-level synthesizing ability to be able to create pretty compelling content.

I certainly think that the simple techniques that existing generative AI uses, where you just have a plain-Jane LLM, may very well be limiting in some substantial ways, but I don’t think that holds up in the longer term, and I think that it may not take a lot of sophistication being added to permit a lot of functionality.

I also haven’t been closely following use of AI in video games, but I think that there are some games that do effectively make use of generative AI now. A big one for me is use of diffusion models for dynamic generation of illustration. I like a lot of text-based games — maybe interactive fiction or the kind of text-based choose-your-own-adventure games that Choice of Games publishes. These usually have few or no illustrations. They’re often “long tail” games, made with small budgets by a small team for a niche audience at low cost. The ability to inexpensively illustrate games would be damned useful — and my impression is that some of the Choice Of games crowd have made use of that. With local computation capability, the ability to do so dynamically would be even more useful. The generation doesn’t need to run in real time, and a single illustration might be useful for some time, but could help add atmosphere to the game.

There have been modified versions of (note: very much NSFW and covers a considerable amount of hard kink material, inclusive of stuff like snuff, physical and psychological torture, sex with children and infants, slavery, forced body modification and mutilation, and so forth; you have been warned) that have incorporated this functionality to generate dynamic illustrations based on prompts that the game can procedurally generate running on local diffusion models. As that demonstrates, it is clearly possible from a technical standpoint to do that now, has been for quite some months, and I suspect that it would not be hard to make that an option with relatively-little development effort for a very wide range of text-oriented games. Just needs standardization, ease of deployment, sharing parallel compute resources among software, and so forth.

As it exists in 2025, SillyTavern used as a role-playing software package is not really a game. Rather, it’s a form of interactive storytelling. It has very limited functionality designed around making LLMs support this sort of thing: dealing with a “group” of characters, permitting a player to manually toggle NPC presence, the creation of “lorebooks”, where tokens showing up trigger insertion of additional content into the game context to permit statically-written information about a fictional world that an LLM does not know about to be incorporated into text generation. But it’s not really a game in any traditional sense of the word. One might create characters that have adversarial goals and attempt to overcome those, but it doesn’t really deal well with creating challenges incredibly well, and the line between the player and a DM is fairly blurred today, because the engine requires hand-holding to work. Context of the past story being fed into an LLM as part of its prompt is not a very efficient way to store world state. Some of this might be addressed via use of more-sophisticated AIs that retain far more world state and in a more-efficient-to-process form.

But I am pretty convinced that with a little work even with existing LLMs, it’d be possible to make a whole genre of games that do effectively store world state, where the LLM interacts with a more-conventionally-programmed game world with state that is managed as it has been by more traditional software. For example, I strongly suspect that it would be possible to glue even an existing LLM to something like a MUD world. That might be via use of LoRAs or MoEs, or to have additional “tiny” LLMs. That permits complex characters to add content within a game world with rules defined in the traditional sense. I think I’ve seen one or two early stabs at this, but while I haven’t been watching closely, it doesn’t seem to have real, killer-app examples…yet. But I don’t think that we really need any new technologies to do this, just game developers to pound on this.

tal,

Training a model to generate 3D models for different levels of detail might be possible, if there are enough examples of games with human-created different-LOD models. Like, it could be a way to assess, from a psychovisual standpoint, what elements are “important” based on their geometry or color/texture properties.

We have 3D engines that can use variable-LOD models if they’re there…but they require effort from human modelers to make good ones today. Tweaking that is kinda drudge work, but you want to do it if you want open-world environments with high-resolution models up close.

tal,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B%2B

N++ is a platform video game developed and published by Metanet Software. It is the third and final installment of the N franchise, which started with the Adobe Flash game N. It is the sequel to N+. The game was initially released for the PlayStation 4 on July 28, 2015, in North America, and July 29, 2015, in Europe, and was later released for the Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems on August 25, 2016, and December 26, 2016, respectively. The Xbox One version was released on October 4, 2017.[1] The Linux version of the game was released on May 31, 2018.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B

N+ is the console and handheld version of the Adobe Flash game N, which was developed by Metanet Software. N+ for Xbox Live Arcade was developed by Slick Entertainment and published by Metanet Software. Unique versions of the game were also ported separately to the PlayStation Portable[1] and Nintendo DS[2] by developers SilverBirch Studios and Atari.[3] Metanet Software licensed their N IP for this deal, provided single player level design for both versions, and consulted on the project.

The Xbox Live Arcade version was released on February 20, 2008, and three expansion packs were released later that year on July 23, September 10, and October 15.[4] The handheld versions were released on August 26, 2008.[5][6] N+ was followed by N++ in 2015.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_(video_game)

N (stylized as n) is a freeware video game developed by Metanet Software. It was inspired in part by Lode Runner, Soldat, and other side-scrolling games. It was the first of the N series, followed by N+ and N++. N won the audience choice award in the downloadables category of the 2005 Independent Games Festival.[1]

Release: WW: March 1, 2004

tal, (edited )

While that’s true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.

There are ways to archive Steam games, but it’s not the “normal mode of operation”. If Steam dies, you probably don’t have your games. If Steam’s terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.

Some other wrinkles:

  • Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it’s clearly marked.
  • I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn’t doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited. It’s hard to overstate how radical an impact Valve’s support has had.
tal, (edited )

Honestly, it might be better to just do a new, similar game in the same genre and theme. NOLF is pretty long in the tooth now. Hard to compete with current shooters.

en.wikipedia.org/…/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Fo…

The Operative: No One Lives Forever (abbreviated as NOLF) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive, released for Windows in 2000.

That’s a quarter-century ago now.

It was followed by a sequel in 2002, entitled No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way.

Almost as long.

I mean, I don’t think that the actual IP from those games is necessary to make a similar game to scratch the itch.

tal,

I just use lgogdownloader, which is open-source, or for a single game, the web browser.

tal,

Is he running with antialiasing on?

Looking at their system settings page:

borderlands.2k.com/…/amd-optimization/

Their settings for every single GPU listed there seem to have antialiasing off.

It may be that current hardware can’t do that at a reasonable clip

tal,

no TAA

I would like TAA to be available. I think maybe a more reasonable ask is “let me toggle TAA”.

tal,

Ram is cheap

Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.

I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.

checks Wikipedia

The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.

The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.

You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.

Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.

considers

Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.

Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.

Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.

tal,

copyright

This isn’t a copyright, but rather a patent.

tal,

Jack Thompson

For those who don’t remember this guy, he was pretty obnoxious.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)

tal, (edited )

corsair.com/…/scimitar-pro-rgb-optical-moba-mmo-g…

1000009259

OP didn’t expand on it, and his photos didn’t show it, but this mouse apparently has a bunch of thumb buttons, which is a legitimately-rare feature (though it’s not the only mouse out there to have a bunch).

EDIT: Amazon has 786 “gaming mice” with 10 or more — a bit arbitrarily-chosen on my part — buttons, so I guess that there’s a reasonable crop out there.

tal,

kagis

I haven’t played it, but it sounds like it doesn’t have a replay system, which apparently has exacerbated finding cheaters.

tal,

facebook.com/groups/…/1842637456471565/

Sounds like PvE works, but not PvP.

This guy claims that he got it working in PvP, at least at one point:

old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/…/tarkov_on_linux/

Ran fine for me with Proton Easy Anti-Cheat when added to Steam. This was a few patches ago now though. Whenever Streets came out.

tal, (edited )

I doubt it, seeing as it looks like it’s still being actively developed. I’d expect anyone who wanted to have higher resolution textures or whatever to just add an option for that to the main game.

EDIT: It does look like they have abut 500 “addon” tracks, and I suppose that some of those might have higher-resolution textures than the tracks in the base game.

online.supertuxkart.net

EDIT2: Also, it’s not SuperTuxKart, but you’re looking for more-realistic open source racing graphics and haven’t seen it, there’s TORCS. That might do what you want.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-vnkZyDghA

EDIT3: Also Speed Dreams:

speed-dreams.itch.io/speed-dreams

EDIT4: It doesn’t look like you can sort the add-on tracks on the website by size, but you can sort by upload date, and I’d assume that newer tracks are probably more likely to have higher-resolution textures.

tal,

Looking at their dev guidelines page, they don’t have any texture resolution limit other than “don’t use very large textures on very small objects”, so I doubt that the project has any really hard caps.

supertuxkart.net/Texture_Guidelines#texture-detai…

Do not use large textures for small objects—this wastes video RAM.

If they are concerned about distribution size, if the game supports it or could support it, might be possible to have a separate high-resolution-texture package, package those separately.

tal,

Well, someone in this thread linked to the Diablo 4 credits, and those list what they do.

CrankBoy - the original Game Boy game emulator for the Playdate console (my article) angielski

I recently had the good fortune to interview the two developers of CrankBoy - an emulator for the Playdate console which allows users to play original Game Boy games on there (and yes, you can use that crank to play them!)...

tal,

My guess is that most people in the market for a Steam Deck aren’t getting either this or a Deck.

tal, (edited )

He could install https://www.luanti.org/ and mod to his heart’s content.

Like, legality aside, he’s fighting to add value to a game whose publisher has tried to prevent him.

tal,

“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”

I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z15zGaCUjxo

tal, (edited )

Hmm.

I have to say that as pornographic video game tags go, the tag library that itch.io provides is kind of limited. The goony.dev people apparently scraped the tags from itch.io’s database of tags, which makes sense if their aim is to keep pornographic itch.io games visible. But…if goony.dev aims to be a database of specifically pornographic video games, there’s not a lot by way of relevant tag data to make the games searchable.

Contrast with, say, vndb.org’s tag library, which has a wide range of tags specifically dedicated to fine-grained classification of sexual content. Vndb.org isn’t specifically for pornographic games, but tracks and indexes quite a few, and has a very extensive tag database.

I wonder if it might make sense to (a) link to other vendors, like Steam/Patreon/whatever as well and (b) since there are tags on some other sources, incorporate use of those tags as well to get more metadata, since some games are listed on multiple databases or with multiple vendors. Maybe have a way to ask for tags just from one vendor if there’s concern about not forcing users to see mixed data from multiple sources, but that seems like it’d be a significant value-add relative to just searching directly on itch.io or whatnot.

tal,

I dunno if you’re specifically referencing Lawrence of Arabia, but if so, I really like that movie.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvH6PT7I_dI

LAWRENCE: It is the servant who takes money.

AUDA leaps to his feet and backs away from this moral threat as another man might from a physical one.

AUDA: I am Auda Ibu Tayi! (He goes to the edge of the tent and bawls into the darkness) Does Auda serve? Does Auda Ibu Tayi serve? (He faces his persecutors and goes into a furious litany) I carry twenty-three great wounds all got in battle! Seventy-five men I have killed with my own hands, in battle! I scatter, I burn my enemies’ tents! I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure. Yet I am poor! … Because I am a river to my people! Is that service?

tal,

That’s nice, but I’m not going to do so, because I’d rather support the developers of pornographic games financially. They already deal with enough flak without needing to give up sales revenue over this.

It also sounds like at least some of the stores are aiming to make the games available later with different payment processors, so I expect that they’re likely to come back.

tal,

Could be. They don’t say so on the page, though.

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