No recorded direct link of communication. The CEOs and half the board will individually go to company paid lunches with competition, members of the board are straight up members of a competing board. Or even lobbyists and lawyers of competing companies going to events together that happens daily.
“But I pinky promise we don’t talk about our competing business plans while we eat lunch and golf together”
I think most conspiracy theories are bullshit. Especially things that require mass government, academic, and/or inter-industry coordination just cannot happen easily due to the fact that large scale coordination of people is very very difficult.
But in a market with 2-4 long-standing players in an oligopoly with offices right by each other, you bet your ass there is in-person collusion… it has been caught many times and likely the extreme vast majority of cases are not caught. Price adjustment is extremely easy to collude on and has mountains of excuses of plausible deniability and “just following the market” bs. So far, there has yet to be a market that has remained competitive and hasn’t turned into an oligopoly. Monopoly is the steady state of a capitalist system without strict anti-competitive regulations.
Which they don’t do. Their platform has very few features, and doesn’t even have a cart. (Well last time I booted EGS like a year ago).
They have almost no features and of the features they do provide, none of them are great. Their only “feature” is operating at a loss, subsidized by megacorps, for many years like Amazon to gain a bunch of market share.
Luckily for gamers, steam already existed so they couldn’t corner the market and enshittify the entire industry like amazon did.
Lego racers was my first PC video game on windows 98. Holy fuck was it fun and rocket racer was just a cheating portal fuck, but I still beat him a couple times 😂
By god getting a portal was satisfying though.
Never got the hang of rock raiders, maybe because I was too young and I had my friends to tech me StarCraft.
I loved the Lego star wars games, but when the LOTR and marvel games came out I just couldn’t get into them as much. I kept getting stuck in Marvel. Maybe I should go back and play lego LOTR
It comes from having hands bigger than the mouse. I don’t get how taller people can even do palm grip. You would have to click with your finger knuckles.
Battlefront & battlefront 2 first and foremost for sure. Classic battles for socializing, space battles for crash fun, single player galactic conquest
Battle for Middle Earth 2. Big improvement over 1 and you could play as anyone, although Men was outrageously overpowered
Unreal Tournament 1999
Starcraft: Broodwar. We were shitty turtle players, but so much fun
Warcraft 3 (mostly dota, twilight’s eve, and TD)
CS 1.6 and CS:S
Mario kart double dash
super smash Bros melee
Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones
Pokemon Emerald
They don’t make games like that anymore, but then again, it is definitely 75% nostalgia and the good times with friends that I had during those years instead of the actual games.
Now we are stuck playing CS2 online getting rolled by kids on shitty comp servers with 100+ ping 1 day per month or so because there is a 7 hour time difference now. Because online games without sweaty, toxic communities are pretty far in between. Miss the days when video games were fun lol
In cities skylines 1 I started planning for monorail and rail transport systems. Only enough roads to interconnect neighborhood stations, then when you get enough population, tons of buses, then monorails, then trains and try to get rid of as many roads as possible.
To contrast that, I have tried to make the dirtiest, worst cities possible with only roads. Just fun to try different styles.
Pretty much the 6800XT at a good price or a 6800. That is about it. A770 is good if you don’t play any older (like pre 2012) games and don’t mind some things breaking sometimes.
Maybe a 3070 16 gb version if you really really really need CUDA.
They operated at a big loss until people were only using their platform and then hiked prices.
They literally price undercut up and coming websites by a ridiculous margin (20-30% sometimes) subsidized by their rich benefactor loans until they were driven out of business and then jacked up their prices to make profit.
The whole game is getting people using your platform as exclusively as possible and then return to normal prices once you gave enough market share.
If the game requires online features by design, then the company does have the responsibility to keep that online.
If you don’t want to support a game for 5-10 years with online services, don’t make a game that relies on online services. It ilreally is that simple.
Don’t put always online DRM (if hitman servers go down, nobody can play the fully single-player game. Absolutely 0 reason to connect to the internet).
Don’t put online DLC verification. Use a damn code/binary file that steam can distribute theough the store.
if you have a multiplayer game, put an option for self-hosted game servers and LAN. Battefront 2 original is literally still going for 18 years because they were not dumbasses and made a good game with good features and custom server capability
It really is extremely simple to not be a corrupt, money-grubbing piece of shit corpo.
Yeah I spent 60€ to get the avenger titan much later.
The bright side is, it is about as finished as No Man’s sky was. That is, buggy as hell game, but playable. It is fun to go in and fuck around in, but I definitely pity the people who have sunk hundreds or thousands into it.
Be careful, subtitles on Chromecast seem to get progressively more and more out of sync until it is about 3 seconds out of sync if they are not embedded in the media.
The problem with your second statement is that it is patently untrue.
That is why rocketed has been milking GTA microtransactions. The GachaGaming reddit tracks a series of microtransaction-heavy mobile games. They make hundreds of millions (as much as an entire AAA very hyped game release) quarterly through microtransactions.
Companies have come out and said that microtransactions are more profitable than making new games which is why they are shoehorned into every damn piece of game possible by AAA studios.
I hate microtransactions and I wish it wasn’t the case, but stupid kids with daddy’s credit card and stupid gamers and whales make bad games with microtransactions very profitable.