I play Rimworld and Factorio. Those are 200 hours per playthrough each and I do about 2 a year for them. My Steam Deck helps a lot with the latter though. The UI for the former unfortunately does not lend itself to the smaller screen even though the game plays well.
Why are we surprised? They were the ones who pioneered the DLC microtrans model. I would legitimately have been more surprised if this headline were the converse statement.
I am getting really tired of these all these chucklefucks being in charge of things they patently do not understand. Modders are the modern lifeline of gaming. They work for free, fix your fuck-ups, and breath life into games that are years and sometimes decades old. Rimworld and Factorio both started their crowd funding campaigns in 2013, and both are wildly popular 11 years later, still selling copies. Factorio is just now coming out with their first expansion, and Rimworld just came out with their 4th. Neither Ludeon Studios (Rimworld) nor Wube Software (Factorio) have had ANY financial need to produce any other projects besides these games. Why are they so wildly profitable and evergreen? They both have rabid modding communities that have been supported and cultivated by the developers constantly fixing and expanding modding support to allow for an infinite variety of new content to be created for their games. Hell, the Vanilla Expanded team of Rimworld modders have actually turned it into a primary income source via Patreon.
AAA devs need to just sit down and thank these modders for tirelessly working on their games after release for free. Ever since DoTA became more popular than Warcraft 3, they all have their panties in a bunch and keep trying to claim ownership over all mods. No, bad developers smacks on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. God, it pisses me off to no end.
I saw that line and immediately thought “oh ho ho, we have a loophole. This wasn’t a subjective review, it was entirely objective. The game is objectively shit.”
As far as I’m concerned the inclusion of the “anti-DoTA” clause in their EULA murdered it for me. I was so excited. KSP is one of my favorite games of all times, largely as a result of the vibrant and very technically advanced modding community. Same goes for essentially all of my favorites; Rimworld, Backpack Hero, Factorio. The free labor that expands the games in major ways extends the value of my money and let’s me have fun forever in them.
Putting in a clause in a EULA which automatically and irrevocably assumes all ownership and rights to any code or assets that are created for a game is just too far. Assuming rights at all is a huge issue for me, but I can accept that it is beneficial to assume royalty free licenses to the mods, I’ll even begrudgingly accept clauses that allow developers to gaffle features and optimizations from mods without giving remuneration or even acknowledgment. But wholesale ownership that revokes all rights and licenses for the independent 3rd party creator. Fuck that. I will never support a game that I find out is treating the people who keep games alive and relevant for decades for free like that.
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
While I don’t disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.
It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with “big words” as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.
Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
I’m usually putting on indie game reviewers on YouTube while I work for background noise. Have found many amazing games that way. I cannot recommend Retromation, Splattercat, Nilaus, and ImKibitz enough if you are into their game preferences. I also watch Olexa and Real Civil Engineer, but more for the laughs. They have good first looks though. Nilaus and ImKibitz are more automation and city-building games, Retromation and Olexa do a lot of rogue likes, and Splattercat is kinda a catch all.