The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.

• Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
• Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
• Linux, Proton
• Well designed hardware innovations

Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.

GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.

Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.

Metaverse and AI, lmao

B…B…B…BLOODY SCREEN! SO REAL!

That’s IMO a big part of what’s different between the 7 transition and this one. Last time Microsoft was going around upgrading people’s computers for them, and even if people didn’t want to jump to 10 right away, they allowed Win 7, 8, and 8.1 keys to activate it pretty much whenever. Now with their hardware requirement, they’re official line is telling people without TPM that their hardware is junk when they stop supporting Win 10. That drove people to look for the better alternative Microsoft won’t tell you about.

It was 5-10 years ago, not too hard to find and a little before Google intentionally made things harder to find. I’ve used many public and private trackers, but it’s just that these days my interest in movies has disappeared almost completely, and I’m happy with most of the games I have.

I’ve had a lot less of a desire to pirate games after moving to Linux full time a few years ago. But FitGirl has been the one reliable place for public torrents, compaed to chancing it on the third Google Link or scrolling through the Russian CS-Rin-Rulette forum to find links.

You are correct, though it bears stating that they make millions from kids gambling and they make billions for their software distribution platform, as one indicator of Valve’s priorities as a for-profit company.

Call me a shill, but Valve’s actions indicate that they care about the money that comes from improving a product or service. That differentiates them from many publicly traded companies that care about money at the expense of the quality of their own products and services.

Waiting for the free to claim weekend. Or have Epic offer me a free Steam Machine one week as thanks for opening their still half-baked store.

Definitely, agreed with you on all these points.

Tell me what a zionist game is. I’m not from the USA nor do I live there. I’ve told my local representative to have my country recognize Palestine, that’s since been done.

Anyway, I wish you a good day riding upon your high horse.

Okay, thanks for the feedback.

I don’t need anything from City Skylines 2 other than a fully fledged custom 3d asset importer. Then it will be as if the game has thousands of unpaid staff making content. Though if this next team picks up from an unfamiliar location it might still be a long time before we could even think of getting it.

More updates will be nice.

And I mean Gabe is overseeing the Valve team’s success, allowing his employees to develop at their pace and following what appears to be their passion. They aren’t shoehorning AI or whatever the latest buzzword to goose some imaginary number. Gabe was pissed at Windows enough, he used to work for Microsoft, so he’s instrumental in helping break Microsoft’s monopoly on gaming operating systems by supporting Linux compatibility and releasing first party hardware.

He deserves credit for the culture he cultivates in his company and shares in its success. Likewise, shame should be where shame is due, like with the whole lootbox gambling economy thing. The main reason why it is viewed as refreshingly good is because they seem to be one of the few big companies that still believe that profit growth comes from valuing employees, suppliers (gamedevs) and consumers, rather than trying to squeeze every last drop of profit no matter how cruel. It should be the norm yet it seems to be the exception.

It would be nice to have no billionaires, but right now we live in a world where government tells states to clawback aid they gave to hungry families so taxing the rich, or acting in any way that resembles normalcy, is a lot to expect right now. We can let Gabe make a silly luxury purchase.

If Valve burns the trust it has earned, then I will move away from them too, I don’t owe Gabe or Valve anything.

Hurry! Release the server code on the high seas before the Sony lawyers find you!!!

Oh boy I also hope this comes with the login queue battle royale mechanic (video) as well. Couldn’t call it a modern AAAA experience without one.

I’ve done all of that on my Nintendo 3DS… I’m being obtuse with that, but what you listed is not the Steam Deck’s primary intended purposes either, gaming is its primary use and Valve’s not being nefarious omitting secondary uses.

As a converse example: the fact you could play games on a Tesla vehicle, doesn’t mean Elon Musk has to call it a games console car.

1.5V Li-ion batteries in AA size that can be charged by USB-C are now available. For stuff like TV remotes, flashlights, little toys and gadgets anything more seems overpowered than needed.

If not a games console, what is the Steam Deck? Calling it just any ol’ personal computer would be ignoring the two halves of a gaming controller fused to either side of it.

He has no official ties with the European Citizen’s Initiative (besides “hype-man” as I recall he described it) but he is the founder of the Stop Killing Games movement, encompassing the original research effort in terms of what people could do to stop games being lost or intentionally destroyed.

In one sense yes they are a monopoly. But there are alternative game stores. However Valve has earned their cut of money by actually trying to make a platform that works for game developers, game players and themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, they have a high risk of turning bad and extorting the market they have captured. But the truth is that every equally or greater sized competitor (Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Epic) has already skipped to the extortion part of the cycle and Valve simply hasn’t, and hasn’t really expressed any intention to do that. Being a privately owned company, Valve is allowed to sit back, enjoy the money they do make and not have to constantly ask for more, and develop what the staff feel like making without strict deadlines.

The smaller competitors are still great even if not as feature filled (GOG, itch) and you should support them too. So while I reject that Valve is the big bad, I also reject that Valve could never enshittify. My position is that Valve has earned a trust no one else has (even itch had to cave to Credit Card companies), and that trust is Valve’s to break.

I think your average Linux user does want to give game creators their fair share. But they would like to withhold from those that take away from others.

I more or less stopped pirating games after moving my PC to Linux full time.

I knew that this game was overhyped and its life would be limited, but now is the time to try to preserve this game as much as possible ahead of shutdown date.

With CoD BO3 extensive ability to be modded and workshop support, it could be theoretically possible.

So by tying the bed to Amazon’s cloud exclusively, reduces its uptime from 100% to 99.5% or lower…

One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft’s online support pages and the amount of support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.

Paradox’s modus operandi is to put everything in DLC after DLC package. It’s worked sometimes in the past (for the publisher, developers and end users) but when “base-game” releases have been so half-baked due to publisher time pressures in recent years, gamers have gotten tired of having to pay more to get the full game version of the game right around the release date.

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/steam-drops-windows-7-and-8-support-with-the-latest-client-users-told-to-update-to-a-more-recent-version-of-windows-to-continue-gaming

When 7 and 8 support was fully dropped (where the newest Steam client requires 10 or above to run at all), Steam clients on older OSes were not updated automatically. It’s only if you manually try to update the launcher, it would “brick” your installations.

I agree that GOG’s method will stand the test of time better (as we wouldn’t have to archive specific versions of Steam), but for those with existing setups you aren’t SOL right away when support ends.

Interestingly this instalment is made by Sonic Team, when the previous racing ones were made by Sumo Digital.

If Nintendo can abuse the US patent system, it would seem fair for individuals to be able to freely infringe Nintendo’s copyright.

(Note if you are making a Nintendo fan-project, DON’T ANNOUNCE ANYTHING until you get your first usable build ready for release!!!)

Yeah it’s literally 10 Canuck bucks… come on. Piracy would at least people try the real thing to decide whether they like it enough.

The other game is lazy copy work made to take your money and leave you miserable.

That’s a cool new technology. Hopefully the rails were built long and straight enough so that we would be able to see the speeds of 400km/h in the field.

It sounds like you’re asking genuinely. Ross’ interest is in games, hence that’s the area he started it in. He’s already stretched to his limit co-ordinating this limited campaign. He also advised to keep the scope limited so that the opposition to it will be mostly from games companies (Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft, EA etc.) Than from movie companies (Paramount, Disney, Warner Bros. etc.) who will be also pushing as hard, using a lot of lobby money and a whole web of arguments from different fronts, that will be more difficult to deconstruct and rebut.

For other audio and visual content, there are often “analog loopholes” that can preserve media even if in a slightly degraded form no matter how many layers of DRM you put. Games do not have a standard method to do that, so access is unilaterally and permanently taken away without a way for it to have been preserved.

Technically, uh no. Many of the games I haven’t loaded onto my PC would no longer be accessible, correct. But I have a copy of Goldberg emulator, in case Valve doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain.

Restructure is essentially synonymous to being fired/laid-off in Japanese. Shaun points out its used with relatively mixed meanings elsewhere.

Just speaking from my own knowledge of Japanese work culture, each employee and employer are a lot more mutually valued with each other than a relationship with shareholders. The need to frequently turnover staff reflects worse on both. Japanese shareholder relationships with companies, in turn, traditionally (post-bubble era) are less focused on solely “fiduciary duty”. They were more on stability, sharing success with good product releases, customer relations and feeling that you are part of the company itself as a shareholder. Many offer(ed) annual gifts and product samples to their domestic shareholders.

So the idea to pursue short-term growth at the expense of long-term success or popularity, is not as well-received by Japanese executives, employees and the public as it may in North America.

Xbox CEO Spencer ends his series at Xbox by boxing up his Xbox Series X in an Xbox Series X box with the rest of his series of Xbox boxes when he leaves the Xbox office.

To address your first point. Yes it applies to other software, this initiative applies to games because the “buyer purchases a license to allow the seller to remove your purchase at some indefinite time later” practices have been most prevalent in gaming.

Extending the scope too far will bring in more opponents than allies and muddy the discussion. Getting a decisive answer here will inform laws on how other industries should be regulated in separate but parallel legislative processes.

Parliament will have 7 days after it closes before their planned summer recess. You think they will work that quickly to churn out a boilerplate debate?

If the EU petition makes it, then it will provide the UK petition support too as part of whatever debate goes on about it.

The only reason to use Epic is to play one of their exclusive games

Don’t forget we also kindly accept the embers of the cash burnt through free weekly giveaways.