I thought that’s too gruesome but then I saw it was Divinity and that’s about appropriate amount of violence for the series. I’m not sure if it’s the best way to market the game however.

It would make sense to sell every IP they can piecemeal to get some return on this investment.

If I had to guess then Saudi (or MBS) wanted EA FC which can now return to being EA FIFA now with extra Ronaldo. Saudi have enough influence over FIFA via PIF to make this happen.

How about Death’s Door?

YouGov and ESA conducted a 5-minute online survey in the U.S. from September 26-30, 2025 among 1,912 respondents ages 5-65 recruited from YouGov’s proprietary online panel. Data is weighted to be representative of the overall U.S. population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, education and census region. Respondents ages 5 to 17 were asked to complete the survey under the supervision of a parent.

If you want to know proprietary information that provides competitive advantage like weights applied then you might be out of luck, however publishing garbage would destroy YouGov reputation quick and so they don’t have that much incentive to fudge numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_sampling

With the power of math you don’t have to. I’m a data analyst by trade so I take offence to this question every time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination

GoW isn’t really open world, there’s a hub and there’s smaller, mostly linear locations. Gameplay is more of an Uncharted with axes and combos. It is a very good game though.

Piss off, booticker.

Gabe Newell is a CEO of a very small company, staff-wise, can’t feign ignorance.

That company runs multiple games with lootboxes and doesn’t make any attempt at restricting gambling from underage customers. They were restricted from doing so in some jurisdictions, can’t feign ignorance.

If you go even deeper there is evidence of Valve being perfectly aware (and amused!) that their item marketplace is used to facilitate offsite gambling on esports events.

Gabe Newell runs multiple online casinos.

Are you one of those people that think Uber is a tech company and not a taxi company because they have an app?

Please enlighten me how did they move. Let’s have a laugh.

Lootboxes are gambling. Courts in multiple jurisdictions like Netherlands, Belgium or Austria off top of my head agree. I realise it’s normalised in some countries and some people don’t want to admit they have a problem, but that doesn’t mean people have to accept it.

You’re not the best at googling I guess.

Why did various EU regulators had to tell Valve that their gambling business is illegal? It remains legal in some and so he continues to run them there.

Isn’t he CEO of Valve, a company with famously lean amount of staff?

Thanks, I scanned article if it was properly sourced but not that in depth. I’ll take this down.

Pretty sure 99.99% of his wealth at this point comes from Steam taking 30% cut and lootboxes in CS.

Man can’t be responsible for all the nice things in Steam but absolved of creating a lootbox/gambling empire.

If only Valve was a public company and we could get a real look in their finances. I think many people would have a very different opinion of them. My little conspiracy theory is that this lack of transparency is why they’re flying under the radar of EU Digital Markets Act as they sure look like a gatekeeper.

If Valve starts utilising Intel ME to do what I’m warning everyone about is it on Valve or Intel?

Nvidia (and everyone else) sells their GPUs/NPUs to the highest bidders they can legally sell them to. Not sure how that’s relevant to this discussion.

What are Nvidia and Intel doing?

I’m dying on this hill because people act like Valve is different. If I had to guess it’s PC players that want to feel superior to others, even though they were first to lose access to physical copies of games and second hand market it provided.

Valve, unlike Dell, has the power to vertically integrate an ecosystem. They own an app store with de facto monopoly over PC gaming. If Valve says that starting 2030 you can only run Steam on Windows and their own locked down OS (and enforce that via bootloader or some other measure) what can you do about it? You only licensed games from them, never bought them.

The equivalent of that $300 Dell in 10 years is even more likely to be locked down. Open hardware will become more and more niche, and therefore even more expensive comparatively. This is where the entire industry seems to be going.

Multiple online casinos for underage customers that he runs disagree.

Why does it have to? Valve isn’t known for maintaining legacy software. You assume your software will run forever as-is but you can see how that looks like in accelerated timeline in the case of Valve games on Macs.

It’s pretty hard to pirate on iOS (and it will be hard on Android too eventually). Their plan is to do this gradually, definitely not in a single generation of hardware. They’ll have pretty strong arguments for locking down the bootloader (kernel level anti-cheat for games like CoD or Valorant) or just plain locking Steam to supported platforms to lock you out of other OSs first.

Not yet but they hold you by the balls because you buy license most of your games through Steam. Once they’re entrenched enough they can do whatever. Android was a very open platform in the beginning, now it’s almost iOS. You can fork Android / SteamOS but without Play Store / Steam consumers aren’t that interested.

You missed the part where Android wanted to lock people out of installing their own apps. They postponed it for now due to pressure but it will happen eventually. Also the part where bootloaders lock you out of changing OS. This thing is possible when you vendor lock people in a vertically integrated system and people here are completely oblivious to the trap they’re walking into because they think Valve will be forever cool.

There’s been definitely way more people running custom roms 10 years ago. Xiaomi got a start with a custom rom.

What stops Windows? Business consumers paying for the OS and the fact that they don’t have any successful app store. What stops Valve?

Are you sure that’s relevant when every major Android OEM locks their bootloaders now? Illusion of an open system.

Does Heroic launcher guarantee that the game you bought will not break Wine compatibility when patched by the developer? What kind of consumer experience are you trying to sell here?

Lol, for someone who’s been proven to be factually wrong and talking out of ass multiple times already in this single thread you seem incredibly confident that I’m wrong.

Valve being a private company means that they can be even better at playing the long game. The end prize is a platform like Android or iOS so definitely worth it. Valve isn’t exactly a paragon of ethics, they profit heavily from gambling and know perfectly fine with their online casinos serving children. At least Goop targets middle aged women because it’s likely I’m having a conversation with a teenager who now vehemently defeats a multi-billion dollar business.

You could build entire working Android system, dialer, launcher and other regular stuff included, from source. You had to supply some binary blobs for kernel drivers due to ARM platforms being a bit of a clusterfuck but that’s about it. Did people forget this already?

How do you feel about Google requiring apps to be notarised by them to run? How do you feel about locked bootloaders? How did Google get to be able to do that in the first place? I outlined steps that are required to get there and where Valve is on that timeline (this HTC Dream, attempt 2).

First public release of Android was in 2008 but you’re talking about several decades. No billionaire is your friend. Please sober up.

Please stop digging that hole because it’s getting embarrassing.

You did not address anything I’ve said really. I’m going to go with block because I value my time too much.

Market share is very much relevant to determining if some company has a dominant position in that market. You people would be arguing that Internet Explorer 6 wasn’t a monopoly because Mozilla and Opera existed.

So you don’t really know the story of Android, much of it very recent, but you’re going to argue that Valve is not following the same path. What a waste of time.