EDIT: If it’s true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there’s definitely a case here. I didn’t understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.
I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…
claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.”
…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.
This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.
Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.
To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.
But you’re not pointing in the games. You’re moving the view/camera.
You are doing both. They are inherently coupled in this format. But in reality you are not leaning with your hand, you are pointing with your hand, and so the closest 1:1 mapping between movements is uninverted mouse controls.
Also I don’t know what “roll to the left” means here at all. You’d need to draw a diagram or something if you wanted me to understand that part. Your words alone are not enough to convey it.
It’s weird, I thought of it like leaning back & forward to make it intuitive, and our brains can learn to make just about any adjustment with enough practice.
But IRL if you’re physically pointing at one spot and want to move your point of aim up and to to the right for instance, you move your hand up and to the right, just like the uninverted mouse movement. So you’re spending time IRL learning one movement and time in games learning the opposite movement. I think that’s why inverted was so much worse even though I did it that way from the start.
I did the inverted vertical mouse for ages for the same reason, and then one day it just stopped working for me. I think I’d tried other systems and come back to my PC and it suddenly felt wrong. Then I went to normal mouse controls and discovered aiming was more natural and smoother, and I’d probably been sabotaging my aiming by forcing an extra layer of abstraction into it.
If you want to blame someone, blame the producers, not the devs. They don’t want to be pushed to strict deadlines with artificially limited budgets and whatever enshittification method the execs bought into this week. They want to make good games, but often they work under stifling conditions.
By that logic, “You don’t have a contract with me, therefore you can’t own my intellectual property,” should also apply, no?
Like, if your intellectual property was given away on the basis of an ongoing royalty payment, and Disney decides not to honour that contract, then they can’t keep the IP.
Honestly at this point just the peace of mind of working in a FOSS engine and not under a corporation that can do this whenever is enough to motivate me to learn godot. I’ve got some prototypes I can port into that engine to learn on, it might even be some good motivation to start integrating them into a single project.
Oh well, I should’ve said “acquired” there. I mean I bought it on sale, then forgot about it because I wasn’t jazzed to play it right then and there. With pirated games, the act of acquisition is the download, so they are generally available when I’m thinking about them.
Yeah, I remember the Duke Nukem Episode 1 shareware, one of the first games I remember playing actually. There were others but this was the first one that really gelled as a functioning game. A lot of the others were sort of incomprehensible to my small child brain. It’s wild that I can remember these old games then just search them and they’re immediately playable with no setup needed.
I used to avoid it too, but I was less worried about the bugs and more about possible viruses. When I realised there was a crack scene with certain uploaders that are trusted by the community I lost a lot of that worry.
I guess I’m talking about launching and trying the game, rather than finishing it. Like once I start playing, the chances I continue are mostly about the game itself, and probably more about my mood at the time than I’d like to admit. I’m talking about games languishing completely untouched. As someone that’s been collecting a steam library for 20 years, I’ve got well over 1000 games and I haven’t played even close to half of them. I play almost all of the games I pirate. I’ve only started doing that a lot in the last year or two, but even in that time I’ve bought a bunch of stuff I don’t play. The pirated ones just call to me stronger.
Oh sure, if you count the emulator libraries I’ve installed on a retropie in bulk then this number changes, that’s every NES, SNES, N64 and SEGA Mega Drive game ever, but I mean games I specifically sourced. I find if I compare full price individual game purchases versus individually pirated games, the pirated ones still have a better hit rate.