Which is deceptive, at best. Steam doesn’t have pricing clauses for developers’ games. The devs are free to sell their games anywhere they want, at whatever prices they want. But Steam does have pricing clauses for Steam keys. Basically, what allows you to register a game to your Steam account.
You can sell your game for whatever price you want, as long as it’s not the Steam version of the game. They don’t want you giving away Steam keys for cheaper than you can often buy them on Steam. And this makes sense; Steam has a vested interest in protecting their own game keys, and encouraging players to shop on a storefront that they know is reputable; Lots of steam key resellers are notoriously shady, for instance.
Basically, the dev can go sell it cheaper on GoG, or Epic, or their own storefront if they want. As long as they’re not selling Steam keys, they’re fine. But players like having games registered to their Steam accounts, because it puts everything in one place. So devs may feel shoehorned into selling Steam keys (which would invoke that pricing clause) instead of selling a separate version that isn’t registered to Steam. But that doesn’t mean Steam is preventing publishers from selling elsewhere, or controlling the prices on those third party sites. It just means Steam has market pull, and publishers know the game will sell better if it’s offered as a Steam key.
Yup exactly. They see wasted potential, and that pisses them off. Because there’s something they truly want to enjoy, so watching the devs make seemingly dumb decisions can be incredibly frustrating.
Just get a Steam Deck, install EmuDeck, and run Ryujinx or Yuzu. It runs like a dream on the SD. Like it literally runs better than the actual Switch, with options like unlocked frame rates, mods, and cheats.
I say this as someone who owns two Switches: Just get a Steam Deck instead.
This specifically says that getting banned on a shared account will also ban the owner who shared the game. Likely to prevent exactly what you described, where people could evade bans simply by sharing their library with a throwaway account.
Worth noting that this could also potentially be due to differences in censorship/rating laws across country lines. For instance, Germany has some strict regulations regarding Nazi imagery in media. So games need to have a specific Germany-friendly version if they feature that kind of imagery. And Steam may not be able to serve two different versions of the game with a single license.
Small nitpick, but it’s funny that you specifically listed their refunds first. Because they were forced into that. Some may remember how comically awful Steam’s customer support used to be. It was genuinely horrible, with resolution turnaround times measured in days and weeks instead of minutes or hours. There was no instant messaging or automated system; You had to email a sketchy email address, then wait days or weeks for them to finally respond. And chances were good that the response would basically boil down to “lul git fuckd loser, sux 2 b u”
Europe started pushing for them to be more customer friendly, because their refunds in particular were breaching some local European laws. In order to keep operating in Europe, they revamped their refund process entirely and recommitted to better customer service going forwards. But they only started the entire refund revamp in 2015 because they were going to be pushed out of European markets if they failed to comply.
From my understanding, the DMCA argument wasn’t actually tested in court. Since they settled, no court precedent was set with a ruling. It won’t stop Nintendo from trying again, but it at least means it won’t be an automatic win for Nintendo.
Honestly, a good CRT shader is a real game changer for emulation. Many emulators have the ability to add a mesh grid over the top of the image, but this is just about the worst way to try to emulate a CRT; It doesn’t actually emulate CRT pixels, and the black grid laid on top of everything simply reduces the overall image brightness.
For an example of a good CRT shader, consider looking into CRT Royale. The benefit to a shader is that it’s actually running each frame through a calculation before it reaches your screen. So it is actually able to emulate a CRT properly. Shaders can actually emulate the individual red/green/blue pixels of CRTs, emulate the bloom around white text, emulate the smearing that occurs with large color differences, etc… It really does make old games much more pleasant to look at.
Yeah, in most of Europe, 6 months would be bare minimum on top of whatever else the employee’s contract buyout requires. But since the good ol US of A is at-will and doesn’t have employment contracts, employers can just let you go without any notice or severance package.
If you’re looking for more like this, check out the Telltale games. In particular, I’m a fan of The Wolf Among Us. It’s based on a comic book series (called Fables, if you wanted to google it,) where fairy tale creatures are real and live hidden among humans; It’s a good old fashioned murder mystery where the lead detective is the Big Bad Wolf. I won’t spoil anything here, but there are a lot of decisions which can have a major impact further down the line.
The Batman telltale game is very similar; It’s less focused on “Batman the asskicker” and more focused on “Batman the world’s greatest detective” where you’re trying to uncover a plot by an unknown villain.
The Walking Dead is what put the game studio on the map for most people, but it’s ironically the game I like the least. Your choices do matter, so you may end up enjoying it. But I personally enjoyed the mysteries from the two latter games more than I enjoyed the interpersonal relationships in The Walking Dead. But maybe that’s just my autism talking.
In fact, it’s so close to Sunshine that there’s a FLUDD mod on PC. It performs exactly as you’d expect. It’s obviously cheating and makes platforming much easier than intended, but it’s interesting just how close AHIT actually is to Sunshine in terms of how the game feels to play.
In LoL, what really separates the “good” players from the “great” players is teamwork. Low ranks are full of individual players, but upper ranks are full of team players. You can be the world’s best individual player. But unless you can 1v5 every encounter, you’ll still end up capped out in Gold rank. Because even as a good individual player, you’ll lose half your matches from the lack of teamwork.
This is ironically why lots of games end up as shit slinging disasters; When you force randoms to cooperate and tie their individual success to the actions of their teammates, shit gets toxic very fast. The slightest mistake or misjudgement is treated as the end of the world, because we judge others by their actions rather than their intentions. Because it’s entirely possible to lose ranks through no fault of your own. Even if you play a perfect match, you can still lose due to your teammates fucking up. So even small mistakes are judged harshly.
It’s also why Korean teams have historically dominated the leaderboards. In Korea, Internet cafes are a large part of the culture. Kids go to play games with their friends after school. So many of the Korean teams are friends who have been playing together since they were in elementary school. Their teamwork is exceptional, because they know what their friends are going to do in any given situation. They can accurately predict their friends’ actions and reactions, and plan accordingly.
Contrast this with the western style of team building. Recruit individual players to a team, then force them to scrimmage for 12 hours a day to learn each others’ play styles. It’s the corporate “recruit a square peg, then hammer them until they fit into the round hole because that’s what the team needs” philosophy. They’re building teams from individuals, instead of finding teams who already excel together.
Source: Dated a girl who floated between Diamond I and Master rank with her friends. I believe she even got lucky and hit Grandmaster once? I had very little interest in playing the game, but got to learn all about it from her.
It pretty much only makes a difference in FPS games where you’re constantly switching back and forth between crosshairs focus and peripheral vision flick reactions. At 144Hz, motion blur between frames is largely eliminated, so you have more accurate flicks and your vision at the crosshairs is much sharper.
IIRC, South Korea charges an import tax for foreign media. It’s part of why Korea has become a sort of media powerhouse, with K-pop, K-dramas, K-comics, etc… Those things are much cheaper in SK because they’re all local and aren’t being charged that extra tax. So they’re naturally very popular in SK because they’re much cheaper. Sort of a positive feedback loop where the media is cheaper so people consume more of it, which makes the media popular enough to survive on its own outside of Korea as well.