It’s been almost twenty years and I still can’t find a game that gives me the same chills. I was hoping that they’d release a Medieval Remastered the same way they did for Rome Remastered, but it didn’t happen.

I hear that the 1212 mod for Attila Total War provides a more “up to date” experience for today’s standards (graphics, historical accuracy, AI, diplomacy). But I can’t fathom playing Medieval without Duke of Death.

However, Tintin remains under copyright in the EU until 2054.

What the fuck, EU? Since when you’re shittier than the US?

Copyright shouldn’t last more than one hundred years, ffs.

Both the first game of 2024 and the last one was Medieval II: Total War.

Conquered the world with France at the start of the year, now doing the same with the Danes.

I’m just saying what they could do if they were willing to. Your argument was that:
A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.
You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.
B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.

It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.

He is not proposing that the entire industry must self-regulate and that it’s the only solution to the problem. He is saying that this specific instance, the CS skin market, could be solved by Valve taking a firm stance, which not only they are not doing, but are actually working against, such as them side-stepping the regulations imposed on them by the French government.

I’m all in for stricter regulations on gambling by government agencies, but that doesn’t mean that the people side-stepping those regulations aren’t to blame too. While they are not doing anything technically illegal, they are purposefully operating in a grey area to profit off vulnerable people.

And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.

They can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but can stop them by making further money. That happens pretty much all the time in every market.

They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.

A) The video is explicitly about Counter Strike and the gambling market surrounding that specific game; not the whole industry. I agree a more systemic approach (ie. on a government level) should be advisable, but until that day comes, Valve could put an end to this specific problem, which they are currently choosing to ignore because they are profiting from it instead;
B) Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.

Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.

Cool, their competition does it too. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.

Valve literally created the market. If you take the bigger share of the profit, you also take the biggest share of the blame. Casinos are obviously bad, but they are ultimately leeching off the system that Valve put in place.

It’s not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?

When articles get shared about any other company using micro/macrotransactions, predatory tactics or gambling-related schemes, people’s consensus is unanimous, but when Valve is involved, suddenly people have double standards.

Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively […] Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.

Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position. Steam is not the number one marketplace because of the skin market. They are leaving it as is because it nets them money. I don’t know how can you call Steam “fairly tame” when they are literally allowing multimillion dollar casinos to exist and operate without impunity. They sent a C&D to casinos and then washed their hands of the problem, because ultimately they don’t really care about shutting them down.

They could ban accounts linked to the casinos, but they don’t, because they profit from them. They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don’t spend their steam gift cards on CS skins (which, by the way, Coffezilla proposes at the end of the video) , but they’d rather use the gambling loophole of “akshually, it’s not gambling as defined by law”. Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they “don’t have any data” supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.

PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.

Because the term means nothing, really. It’s just a vehicle for hateful rhetoric, incorrectly applied to everything that they don’t like. Yet half the things they like would be considered “woke” by their standards if they were released today.

Considering how it went the last time… Lol

Considering that the standard PS5 is still selling for higher than its launch price 4 years later (despite still facing challenges building up an exclusive library to justify the cost), I’d say that people are just dumb and will pay any price to have their shiny gaming console.

The real reason they are doing all these remasters is so that they can delist the old game and sell it again with the PSN requirements.

Opposite for me. While I dislike DPP graphics, I fell in love with the clean aesthetic of HGSS and never warmed to the pixelated mess that is the 5th gen.

It’s been a while since I played those games, but I distinctly remember my younger self feeling bummed that all the nice touch screen interactions from 4th gen disappeared when BW released.

I haven’t played It Takes Two, but my sister and I really enjoyed playing through A Way Out together a few years ago. Fares and his studio really know what they are doing.

Instead of gradually lowering the prices, publishers tend to keep the original price and give it higher discounts as time goes on. People read it and think “wow, it’s 90% off! I can’t miss this deal!” and buy the game.

Not on steam, but I bought Haven and The Talos Principle 2 on GoG.

I already played Haven on GamePass a few years ago, but I wanted to own it because it’s very good (also to support the developers). As for Talos, I played the original twice and absolutely loved it, so I’m eager to play the sequel.

Terminator was almost correct. The real terminator will be Arnie walking around in a fursuit.

I’ll be back. UwU

Spike Chunsoft also developed the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games and, fairly recently, the new Dragonball game that, as far as I know, got good reception.

Kinda lame that these developers will be locked to PS or (months after release) Steam with PSN Account.

EDIT: And according to comments from Reddit, Kadokawa is a huge corporation that also distributes anime, manga and light novels. This isn’t just about games.

Thank you so much for writing these posts! Don’t worry about slowing down a bit, I’m way more interested in quality instead of them just devolving into a boring streak of daily screenshots, and most importantly, it’s supposed to be fun for you in the first place! It shouldn’t feel like a job! You can’t write good reviews of games if you are not enjoying playing them in the first place, or you’re prevented from fully enjoying them by the rush of finding a new title for tomorrow’s post.

As for this one in particular, I’ve had it in my wishlist for quite a while. I’ve enjoyed most of Dontnod’s games and this one seems quite peculiar indeed. I heard a few divisive opinions on it, but you convinced me to give it a fair try.

I’m not a US citizen, but happy veteran day!

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Isn’t it the same as with every other entertainment system? I grew up with a big brother and a little sister. We only had one PS1, later one X360. We could either play in co-op, or take turns. Sometimes my father would also play on the console, and we’d do something else in the meantime.

What’s different about the Switch? It’s an entertainment system. You insert the game, you play. I don’t have one, but I’m pretty sure it allows for different accounts to be created and each have their own save file, so there’s no need to buy multiple consoles/multiple copies of the same game. You can either play on the go, or hook it to the TV and play with the bigger screen. You are not forced to play party games just because you have a bigger screen, and you are not forced to treat it like a “personal device” just because you are playing on the smaller screen (I also despise the idea of “personal device” for kids: learning to share games is a very important lesson for kids).