GoG is very much about the marketing of game preservation. That said, to my knowledge, they (like Steam) don’t remove it from your account. Just from the store. So if you bought it, you can still play it.

GoG is a bit better in that their DRM model only requires you to authenticate to download, not reinstall. So you can theoretically archive all of your purchases if you have way more storage than you should. But it also is horrible at surfacing when an installer has an update so… mostly this is only viable for truly dead games.

I like GoG a lot as a platform but it has always rubbed me wrong that they pretend they are focused on game preservation. But that also might be because I am old enough to remember The French Monk incident.

Auto scaling feels good IF it encourages you to play smarter or adapt.

Rimworld’s model encourages you to build the same death funnels/mazes on every single colony.

Which I think is my biggest complaint. Okay, no, the edgelord bullshit is my biggest. My SECOND biggest is that Rimworld is just so clearly designed around an optimum path. Whereas games like Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included very much are about actually running a colony. Making sure needs are satisfied and prioritizing them. Not “oh. Okay. The game decided I had too much food stockpiled so five meteors just hit my solar farm”.

I want to like Rimworld but every time I even think of giving it another go it is like a massive wave of fans come out of the woodwork to scream about how they are all cannibals with slaves locked up to make pleasure farms and just… yeah.

Also I am not a fan of the storyteller system. It is nice that you get some variety but it mostly just boils down to tedium (and I think most players just switch to Random Ricky or whatever so it won’t actively destroy their colonies?). And, overall, I don’t like that you can go from success to wipe in like ten days. I am not saying everything needs to be Dwarf Fortress “Oh… we have been in a fail state for ten years…” but I do prefer there to be a long enough time period to actually realize I done fucked up.

Yes. That is the security theatre part of it.

A metal detector would only matter if that were an electronically triggered shoe device. And the x-ray/“scanner”, as mentioned, has trouble distinguishing between different materials and also works best if it is an electronically triggered shoe device. A fuse and a lighter ain’t it.

Again. There are ways to actually be secure. That isn’t what TSA (or their national equivalents) is about.

So people were protesting. The cops opened fire, shot one of their own, and spun it as said protesters who

individuals dressed in black, military-style clothing began shooting fireworks and engaging in acts of vandalism at the facility,

Were ACTUALLY ambushing and trying to murder cops.

Financing can actually be an incredibly good idea if you expect inflation to increase at a greater rate than the interest. It literally saves you effective money.

That said, it also tends to involve a credit pull (which hurts said interest rates) and becomes a monthly bill.

So if you can afford the monthly bill AND it is a meaningfully large purchase AND you have every reason to expect inflation to increase more than the interest rate? It is actually a pretty good idea.

For even a 200 dollar battle pass: no, it is not.

Don’t worry everyone. I don’t like musk any more than you do but you can’t deny that space x is amazing and perfect and sexy and not Jewish and will solve all problems because nobody else in human history ever thought of a reusable vessel!

And this is definitely a “good” reminder to reach out to a buddy at NASA

Understand the Steam Controller came out 10 years ago and was meant to be used in the decade or two prior to that when “real PC games” didn’t support gamepads. Contrast that with today where CRPGs and RTSes often have official bindings.

There are two ways to use a trackpad. The first is to swipe (like a laptop trackpad) and the second is press and hold. For the former, the delta between where your thumb is and where it was is used to translate to cursor movement. For the latter, think of it like an analog stick. The center of the trackpad is 0 and your input is the delta between 0 and the location of your thumb at this moment.

So press and hold lets it emulate an analog stick and swiping is very useful for moving a cursor on the screen. And there are/were plenty of ways to switch between the modes on the fly.

The bottle of water actually has real reasons behind it.

For the scanners the TSA (used to?) uses, it is REALLY hard to distinguish between liquids. Water looks like shampoo looks like hot sauce looks like the magic binary liquid that Bruce Willies had to solve riddles to save Hey Zeus from. So a bottle of “water” actually is a big safety concern… yet apparently a quart of miscellaneous liquids totally isn’t and I won’t expand on that because I am already on too many watchlists.

Which makes it kind of unique in that it is (was?) a very valid safety concern AND extra hilarious in that it highlights the theatre of it all because of that. It also gets MUCH MUCH funnier when international flights pretend it is about protecting ecosystems even though everyone just chugs their water or empties it into a bin.

For funsies, the shoes thing will probably end up being a huge headache but has different rationales. Back in the before times, everyone had metal buckles and eyelets and so forth on their shoes. That… really hasn’t been true for over 30 years where shoes are almost all rubber and plastics. But the former would trigger the metal detector.

That said? People who wear nicer boots still tend to have enough metal to trigger it (the bane of the pre-check line). So either they turn off the metal detector below the knee or EVERY queue is going to be the pre-check line at seatac.

That would actually be awesome.

I like Kenshi a lot. But it really feels like Gothic in that the start of any given character more or less feels identical. Same steps to get to the point where you can start doing the stuff that actually makes the game really fun. A lot of CRPGs in the 00s/early 10s had that problem and Kenshi ramps it up to 16.

Yeah…

I liked the concept of GK and the core loop (particularly corpse handling) was great for plate spinning. But they just kept adding more and more and more. And it didn’t help that buying one “wrong” tech could mean you have to spend four or five weeks grinding enough research points of one color. Like, it is very much designed in the Call of Duty “number go up, bells and whistles” mindset.

But I think my biggest issue was that it is… it isn’t an edgelord game but it definitely feels like it REALLY loves Family Guy if you catch my drift. So whereas a Stardew or even a Kynseed has a world that you care about enough to put the time in, Graveyard Keeper actively makes me want to just walk away from everything. And apparently there isn’t even any closure on the core story since they wanted to leave it open for a sequel.

I think Dave the Diver did a much better job of just endless plate spinning. But I also noped out of that once I was up to like four different daily tasks, and three or four opportunity tasks, all while the story was being randomly padded out for no apparent reason.

I mean… if you look at what I bought in the past five years you would think everyone was obsessed with spreadsheets and 100 hour CRPGs. That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of games are made with cross platform in mind and many historically “M+KB only” games have excellent gamepad support. Sometimes, annoyingly, only in the console build but…

Yes. I do think Steam Input is awesome (even if it was basically just a cleaner interface to xpadder/joy2key). That isn’t the Steam Controller. The Steam Controller is what Valve was using to promote The Steam Machines which was their failed attempt at a console.

Again, just to make this clear: I am not saying the Steam Controller was bad. I am not saying Valve is bad. I AM saying it was not “forward thinking” and was very much rooted in a PC gaming era that was ending as orders were being shipped out.

“ahead of its time” to let people play a game from 1999 is kind of my point.

The Steam Controller was very much designed with 90s/VERY early 00s gaming in mind where you might have a closet full of controllers for every game you like. A wheel for racing, a HOTAS for flight sims, a different HOTAS for mech sims, a gamepad, a guitar controller, a spinning knob, etc.

But it came out at almost the exact same time that the entire industry standardized on xinput with different face button labels. AND when xinput was making it trivial to just use that xbox controller on your PC.

Strong disagree. If anything, it was the opposite.

The Steam Controller was AMAZING for playing games that did not have gamepad support. And I still think it is the best way to play Stardew Valley. But it also came out at a time when PC ports to console were more or less expected and even RTSes had gamepad support out of the box.

At which point you have a controller that only makes sense for a very limited subset of games.

That said, a Steam Controller 2 that is basically the deck minus the display would be amazing.

While I do hope this leads to a pushback on “I just put all our corporate secrets into chatgpt”:

In the before times, people got their answers from stack overflow… or fricking youtube. And those are also wrong VERY VERY VERY often. Which is one of the biggest problems. The illegally scraped training data is from humans and humans are stupid.

Its also worth remembering that the people who grew up with and have nostalgia for those “classic games” are late late 30s-mid 40s and have other stuff to do than to sit and watch a stream for five days.

At the end of the day, GDQ is a company that raises money for charities. And they need to focus on what will get the most eyes, and thus wallets, on the product. Watching someone glitch through the ceiling in a 2D sonic that nobody in the audience has any real interest in ain’t gonna do that. Breaking apart the games that the audience IS familiar with will.

I dunno. I fully agree it is the correct thing to do and am glad they do it. But I’ve been pretty sour on GDQ proper since AGDQ 2021. The Show Must Go On and all that but something about the discord mods going completely insane to shut down ANY mention of the violent insurrection just rubbed me the wrong way. And, to my knowledge, there wasn’t even a “Hey… this is really fun and all but maybe just check a few news sites during the break and make sure everyone you know is okay…” on the stream. I’ll watch a VOD if it goes viral but it is just hard to vibe with that looming over it.

The “big franchises” that are how people find success in a gamepass world? Or do you still think that Dungeons and Dragons Presents Baldurs Gate 3 By Larian Studios is a tiny indie game?

Also: Maybe you should check out how the music industry is doing as countless artists talk about how hard it is to break out at all and one of the more popular bands on spotify (?) is literally AI slop?

Also

Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all?

Tell me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs without telling me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs.

If you want to discuss this? Either be open to learning or educate yourself ahead of time. But if you are just going to insist on vibes and how everything is going to just work out? You are wasting everyone’s time.

Baldurs Gate 3? The game part of one of the bigger franchises in all of gaming (D&D) that is the sequel to one of the most celebrated franchises in all of gaming (Baldurs Gate) that had been in Early Access for years AND which was developed by one of the three best CRPG developers in all of gaming (Larian).

Well, you heard them: just make more Baldurs Gates!

For a healthy mega publisher/platform with a lot of fingers in the pot? It will increase overall profits and, theoretically, those profits can be redistributed. This is effectively what EA did in the late 00s/early 10s where Madden and The Sims meant games like Mirror’s Edge (or… The Sims) could be created.

The problem being that once a few of the tentpoles collapse? it ALL collapses

Also, this ignores the companies that aren’t part of that megapublisher who now are fighting “just play Halo or Call of Duty, it is free with gamepass”. At best it creates an environment where it doesn’t really matter how well a game sells so long as you sold N licenses to Humble and MS and Sony and so forth. Which effectively incentivizes “streamer bait” games.

Also: We have seen exactly this play out in music and film/TV.

If your goal is to actually make a point or argument: make it. Don’t just tell people to read a manifesto until they agree with you.