I just found out about Tabletop Game Shop Simulator and I found it to be a nice alternative to TCG Card Shop Simulator. It only has a demo currently, but it’s been pretty fun to dip my toes into the shop simulator genre of games.

Same here, I dropped League of Legends when they added it as a requirement. I can sorta deal with a kernel level anti-cheat if it only runs while the game is running, but an always on kernel level anti-cheat is a no go for me.

Some games do have different behaviors for different enemies, I can’t really point to any one modern game off the top of my head. However, I do remember the first Half-Life touting that as a major feature and it being cool to experience back when that game first came out. I remember some enemies would throw your grenades back at you or fall back and regroup, some would just run straight at you, and others would attempt to sneak around and flank you.

I believe you have to first close Vanguard and then you can get BF6 to launch. If you want to play Valorant again you have to fully restart your computer as there is no way to successfully relaunch Vanguard after closing it.

I don’t know for sure, but I would assume this would effect people with League of Legends installed as well since it also uses Vanguard for anti-cheat.

Yeah, I figured it would probably be something more like that order of operations. But I’m also sure there is probably a clause in the agreement between dev and store that says they can pull your game for any reason without notice, so there’s probably nothing that can be done.

I do kind of wonder of any of these game devs could go after these payment processing companies for loss of income? I’m not a lawyer, but I’d definitely be looking into it if I was a Dev that has been effected by this.

At least with Team Fortress 2 they have always had dedicated servers you can host yourself. Most GaaS never provide a server that you can run and host yourself.

I may have to finally make the switch. Are there any initial pains that you found from switching?

You’re right, I don’t, but it sure as hell makes it a lot easier to keep the hundreds of games that I have purchased organized. Not to mention I don’t have to manually keep each of the 95 games I currently have installed updated or have to worry about backing up game saves or having them available across multiple different devices with zero effort from myself.

Steam isn’t perfect, but it does add a massive amount of value for consumers like myself who take advantage of a lot of the different features that are mostly unique to Steam as a platform.

Also, I believe when a developer releases a game on Steam they are given the opportunity to use Steamworks, which provides a lot of potentially useful tools for a game deceloper.

It’s a developers choice to release on Steam with DRM, Valve does not enforce it, there are games with no DRM on Steam.

Half baked features? I don’t remember the last time I tried using one of Steam’s features that I listed (and others I didn’t list) and it didn’t work incredibly well.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe DRM generally only causes problems for paying customers and I’d be much happier without it, but I think Steam’s DRM is one of the least invasive solutions that currently exist.

“…their useless proprietary launcher.” Steam is by far the least useless launcher out there. Steam has so many incredibly useful features such as remote play together, community controller layouts, the workshop, cloud saves, family library sharing, etc. Not to mention that they continue to keep adding new features that no other launcher is even close to having such as the new game recording feature that is currently in beta.

Sure, Valve charge a pretty decent amount to game developers for the sale of a game, but they provide a load of features in exchange.