Diablo III and IV don’t have a monopoly on the genre. There’s Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the Borderlands games, all playable offline, even in multiplayer. They’re not exactly Diablo, but you’ll hardly get closer than Grim Dawn, and there’s no reason you need to be married to the Diablo IP anyway. That kind of brand stickiness is how you get taken advantage of.

Personally, when something like that doesn’t respect my values, I’m not even finding myself tempted by them these days. Oh, it’s always online? It’s dead to me. There’s a deluge of other stuff to play, including games that are similar but respect my values.

You’ll have to convince those other developers to release on GOG. It’s not Valve preventing them from doing so.

I think you just internalized this to be only about online shopping, but that was never what I meant.

If consumers’ regular buying habits at the time were not to buy on Steam by default (which they weren’t), then it’s unimpressive, and not a feasible poster child, for one’s game’s ability to survive in the modern market without Steam. That’s the point I was making. Brick and mortar was the de facto storefront for PC games at the time that most of those games came out, so it was not strange for an always-online game to sell itself online-only on their own web sites. These days, skipping Steam is not a path most will take, and for good reason.

Steam was a launcher for games most people still bought on discs back then. I remember 2007 was the first time I bought a game on Steam, and it wasn’t a regular habit for years after that. It wasn’t about which other digital store you used; it was that, as a digital store, it held no power in the market compared to brick and mortar. Plus, back then, PC gaming was definitively second fiddle to consoles.

Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.

To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.

In 2005 when Roblox came out? No. League of Legends came out in 2009, and I had barely started shopping on Steam for non-Valve games back then. Most of us were still buying games on disc at Walmart. Minecraft was doing early access before Steam had the feature.

I’d love to see this as an official tag on the store page.

A software company can run its own store, and make its own launcher. Just look at so many of the big titles over the last two decades: Minecraft, League, Tarkov, War Thunder, Roblox, and more recently Hytale.

This is also survivorship and selection bias though. Not only would you not have heard of the ones that failed, but these are the games confident enough to not launch on Steam in the first place. Several of them are so old that Steam was in its infancy and not the de facto storefront when they came out.

Plenty of great games are not immune to failing even when they’re on Steam. The market is tough. But at the same time, it makes perfect sense that Steam has a rule preventing you from taking advantage of their infrastructure for marketing and communicating with customers while you make it available on Epic first for less money.

The only people I’ve friended online that I didn’t know in person were other people who play Skullgirls, because it was the only way to pick their brain on how I can improve, or even just to send a “ggs”. These days, we’re basically all in the same Discord server, so I can usually start typing @ and a few letters of the name they used in quick match and find them pretty easily, so it’s been a while. Still, those people are mostly strangers to me, and sometimes their accounts get hacked. The scam I’ve seen multiple times at this point is that they need people to go to an external site and vote for them to get approved for a Counter-Strike ranked league or something. I don’t know how it works, but I’m not clicking that link. If that’s how that CS ranked league works, find another one with a better method of letting you in.

Neither of these are redemption arcs where a company was let off the hook. They’re using early access the way it’s intended. The biggest thing stopping me from playing early access games is the deluge of finished games coming out all the time.

The argument they gave, cited in the article, is that there’s a skill component to them. By which I’m guessing they mean playing Ultimate Team with the contents of the loot boxes, but it doesn’t get specific. And I still don’t think that would add a skill component to the loot boxes themselves.

Iridium Studios? Man, I thought this studio closed down or something. Their last game was a long time ago.

I’d like to see these justices demonstrate the skill involved in opening these loot boxes. What are the hot strats?

With any luck, it’s because this issue is such a slam dunk that it’s got broader support than more divisive initiatives. In reality though, it’s most likely just because YouTuber drama got more eyeballs on it; and if that’s the difference here, the EU really ought to re-examine how they do these initiatives. 1M signatures out of a population of 440M is a tough bar to clear.

Sure, but you take the good with the bad. Most games work, and you get to actually own a copy via GOG. Hopefully they do proper integration with Proton in the future, and this position they’re hiring for may very well lead to that. There’s the option to buy games through Heroic, which gives Heroic a cut of GOG sales, so I’m sure to always do that so that I send the signal to GOG what’s important to me and how they can earn my whole dollar.

There’s also a very generous 30 day refund policy, so if you’re at all unsure, make sure it’s working in that first month. I was pretty close to refunding The Alters, because that game just barely works via Proton, even with the right workarounds. Hell of a game though.

It is the role of government to regulate those problems, but you can’t uninvent a technology. As for me in my work, the most I can say is that I almost used AI once; a coworker did it for me before I could get to our company approved AI page. That, plus other companies mandating its usage (if it was really so great, it wouldn’t be difficult to convince anyone to use it) is why I’m not confident that it is one of those inevitable technologies. But if it is, being a dick to people about it is stupid.