But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.

The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.

All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.

But for now… it’s pretty good.

Omg they’re going to get n-bombed by a 12 year old to death!

I wanted to play it but even at $5 I don’t think I can justify giving them money after what they did to Mick Gordon.

Perhaps 2nd hand.

2097 was cool for sure, and I used to listen to a lot of the music that was in all the games and bands the designers had done artwork for.

I love the design in wipeout 3. I know it’s not for everyone. It was the same designers as 2097, and a deliberate choice by them to try to create something minimal that would feel like a real racing league. I think they did a fantastic job. I love that there’s no logo. I love that some of the text is huge and angular with no antialiasing and some is tiny and heavily antialiased, I love the pixel perfect selection boxes. It’s so fantastically on point as a grown up evolution of 2097.

If anything, I think it holds up better today than it did at the time.

Also touches like the birds on the first track are fantastic.

(Btw I’m not talking about the special edition where they made the text bigger and uglified it significantly)

I’ve been playing Wipeout 3 via an emulator on my steam deck, it’s fucking great. Well, the difficulty curve is brutal but it’s great fun and stands up today. The design elements are still fantastic.

Then I’m going to begin not fucking watching YouTube.