Getting to know other cultures and realize how much of a bubble your society lives in = Russian “LGBT propaganda”

It is, but the alternative is that everything would get pirated instead. And like Trump, Russia is fishing for a “woke” escape goat to continue to come up with excuses to shut down exposure outside of the state controlled media, which Steam provides.

If Steam goes out of Russia, there will be a state sanctioned pirate streaming service for games, and it will include spyware. Steam isn’t just one entity, it is an entity for every country it decides to operate in.

Still, I’m not going to complete defend Valve on this, but at least they aren’t pulling a “many gamers complained about this and we listened” card. They also didn’t remove the game from the store in its entirely just because Russia was complaining, but limited access to it locally.

Maybe Valve should get out of Russia, but I don’t see this negatively affecting Russians as much as it will make the bubble they live in even more closed off. VPNs would be an alternative if Russia wasn’t criminalizing them.

Let me get this straight.

No to Devotion. Wishlisted like hell.

No to Nine Sols. Wishlisted like hell.

Yes to girls riding naked men wearing horse masks and videos of horses having sex. Not even a wishlist page.

Al’righty then. Guess “many gamers” want their pedophilia mixed in with their zoophilia.

I saw a Black Friday sale for a 5080 for around €1k, a decent OC model too. I have no interest in supporting NVIDIA or their fire hazards with the way they’ve been acting.

Nope, now you are giving it off more.

nervously laughs while moving away

You are really giving off “it’s not pedophilia, it’s hebephilia” vibes here…

Yes, technically, they fixed an issue, that doesn’t fix how it was able to become an issue in the first place. The developers are either going for “very, very thinly disguised fetish” or completely absentminded outrage farming in a very bad way.

The trailer includes a girl riding a naked man with a horse mask and footage from a horse humping another.

This would not be the hill I choose to die upon to make a point about bad American companies - criticizing Steam for removing a horror game involving explicit nudity with borderline traces of pedophilia and bestiality in the very trailer.

What I consider sad is that we are really getting no option to run it locally. It’s an excuse to turn everything into a live service where not even a subscription saves you because you can run out of “tokens” now. I have absolutely no issue with OSS tools incorporating LocalLLM aids. If people have modern GPUs then they can use local LLMs in some form or another.

As a CEO you can decide whether to piss off on what your potential consumers demand and don’t. Obviously, there’s a reason why the EGS is in the shitty place it is and Steam isn’t. EGS focuses on developers and publishers even when it means pissing on consumers. Steam might have spearled modern DRM “subscription”-based marketplaces, but they’ve also continued to cater to consumer demands even when it opposed their interests and they could have chosen to ignore them anyway.

Soon: Desolder RAM from PS5 = Profit?

Insane in the memrange.

At this rate, we’ll get sold dumb terminals and subscription services for any computing needs under the excuse of “AI crunch”. Too many centralized tech cartels getting away with controlling supply and demand that paired with global powers turn completely corrupt has helped create these circumstances.

The PS5 has 4K native support since it has better hardware to go along with its bigger size. It also support 4K AI upscaling from 1080, so in some cases it’s the same, although likely with more FPS. The XBox is probably more of the same.

There are some serious cabals controlling the prices. These price crunches aren’t just due to AI, but greed from memory kit manufacturers waiting to see how high they can get the price to go just by letting the AI industry create scarcity.

The whole entire PC manufacturing industry needs to be decentralized, and this is what happens when countries don’t set up their own competitive semiconductor industries but just allow themselves to be manipulated by a few centralized cabals. Good luck trying to prosecute any of these scumbags for anti-competitive practices nowadays.

It’s fake upscaled 4k from 1080, though.

Damned, hadn’t considered that.

I don’t see the use case for myself. It’s too easy to install it through Wifi onto local memory and unlike a cartridge, you can have it installed in as many devices as you share your account. I also would have little overlap between the games I’d run for each platform. I’d trade it for another built-in USB-C port in a heartbeat.

So basically, my last sentence.

The thing is, it would have been so easy to just say what they consider the “abusing” conditions than just leaving it at that. You are going a lot of their whitewashing for them. Sure it could be that, it might probably be that, but is it?

That wording seems very iffy, what’s the difference between using and “abusing” their refunds? How could a player you trust “abuse” said policy and how would you track it considering you are the one issuing the refund in the first place? Just sounds like a weirdly resentful way to say it, almost like they don’t want to issue the refunds but are doing it purely for PR.

As long as it is open, it can be expanded upon. Most VR sets seem like proprietary hellscapes that want to get you trapped into their ecosystem. Steam, for what it is, gives me more faith than most.

Chances are I will just be streaming my main PC remotely through Virtual Desktop, Steam Remote Play, or whatever is the most convenient. The x86 chipset won’t matter because it won’t really run anything that I would want to run that requires x86 well.

The only thing I can complain about is that it seems to have less of an augmented reality focus than Apple Vision Pro, although it’s too soon to tell. I’d like to be able to use VR along with standard keyboard and mouse peripherals with virtual monitors to boot. Instead of letting me decorate some imaginary room, let me decorate my existing room with virtual widgets.

I can already connect the Steam Deck to the TV. The Steam Machine may be 6x times more powerful, but it’s still peanuts to my gaming PCs. I know people are going to get it, I just don’t see much use in it.

The Steam Frame now, I’m interested. A lot of competing wireless VR is tied up with scummy companies more interested in pulling people into their ecosystem than creating something universally usable, and this being a Valve product, you know it’s going to be decent quality and that VR game devs are going to be more compelled to make it work correctly under it.

Because it is the most cookie cutter of cookie cutter of development kits. Other development kits require devs to keep track of lower level engine issues.

Bethesda has been known for lacking any decent capacity for engine handling since the days of Daggerfall.

I’ve been keeping this one on a list for when it gets discounted. Also Avowed.

It is, but with some neurons involved as opposed to yours.

If you are going to dissolve a Bethesda game into different particular genres, you can apply the same logic to Morrowind. I mentioned No Man’s Sky because it incorporates several of them and is so dominant most people just compare everything to it, shame you can’t run it. If you are just interested in space themed genres, Jump Ship is another good one, it includes both ship combat, exploration, resource management, and even has FPS, but lacks in the RPG department and focuses on roguelite mechanics and multiplayer.

I was wondering if you had something that was more akin to an RPG-multigenre alternative to Starfield as a recommendation, like The Outer Worlds with more space combat options, or if the updates for some other existing game franchise like Elite Dangerous, which had been experimenting with FPS, or perhaps Space Engineers, had also begun to compete in this regard. Or perhaps even something akin to what Cubic Odyssey seems to be.

No Man’s Sky seems to have done this with their corvette update, although I’ve yet to try it.

Any good recommendations, or does “the indie scene makes much, much better games” just refer to No Man’s Sky again?

So, where can I purchase Nine Sols on GOG?

It’s ridiculous that Nine Sols will get a Nintendo Switch release before going on GOG. I guess “many gamers” aren’t asking for it - oh wait: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/nine_sols https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/nine-sols-2024

A marketplace that is all DRM-free is good, but when they begin to concede on censorship for the political agendas of certain countries because it might affect their Chinese releases because they have far more of a horse in the race than Valve as a developer does in the Chinese market, you have to balance what you consider a bigger issue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1809540/Nine_Sols/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/Detention/

It only affects a very small minority of games, so it’s up to you whether you consider the censorship a deal breaker. Would a game with an Easter egg criticizing any other country’s politics caused the uproar Devotion did? There’s no shortage of games that do, and as a central plot element as opposed to a simple Easter egg. Then there’s also the fact that GOG insulted people’s intelligence with the excuse of “many gamers”, specially given their continued silence on other Red Candle Game releases that have no similar issues.

If an art form cannot be used as a means of criticism, then it is not one that is free.

https://artandmedialaw.com/artistic-expression-and-free-speech/

When fundamentals like this are so easily violated under ridiculous premises, further capitulation isn’t far behind.

Sadly, on the NVIDIA scale of BS, this is nothing.

Whew, sounds like ripping off the head and spine out of the body of the milk dispensers is still fine.

The only MMOs I don’t return to are the ones whose companies / publishers do this sort of BS.

Mass Effect 5: Commander Shepard returns, to fight the illegal fentanyl trade. Fight the illegal fentanyl smuggling coming from the Elcor empire as you work to make it a part of humanity’s so you can guide them onto a better path and eliminate the grave threat they represent to the rest of the galaxy. The only game brave enough where choosing the Paragon path means an automatic courtmartial followed by the game uninstalling itself and deleting your system folders.

Where are all these prompt based image generators that identify themselves as procedural generation?

“We might deal in derivative IP, but it’s our derivative IP!”

The problem back then was saturation from other competitors who were also cheaper. Noawadays word of mouth through social networks is much more effective.

So, Black Mesa?

Not even with premium gamers?

That’s a DLC feature.

Star Control 3

It received a lot of criticism at the time because they sort of bought into the Star Control 2 / The Urquan Masters IP and ghosted the main devs, but I found it fun too. It’s sort of funny because it has become such a trend of the serious, they also got into a row with the Star Control Origins guys, another fun take by another good studio in the same sort of genre, and even went to court against them. Now the original devs have crowdfunded FREE STARS: Children of Infinity as the official sequel.

In regards to multiplayer gameplay similar to Star Control, there’s Subspace Continuum, particularly the Trench Wars server if it still exists. It’s probably still active. I also remember Stardock did its own take on it called Stellar Frontier. There was also a shareware game called Solar Winds from long ago which was single player but had similar gameplay.