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.

I believe I did answer your question, though I’d disagree with the idea that I’m “defending” anything. There exists nuance between “pro AI” and “anti AI”.

I used an example of two technologies that were destructive and inevitable, now both definitely parts of your daily life, to show how silly it is take a stance against a technology like that. I don’t need to work at GOG for that to be the case. And to reiterate, AI might not be inevitable. If it’s not, this problem takes care of itself economically, and you don’t need to shame anyone.

Both of those things put a lot of people out of work, but our economy adapted, and there was nothing to be gained by shaming the people embracing the technology that was clearly going to take over. I’m not convinced AI tools are that, but if they are, then nothing can stop it, and you’re shaming a bunch of people who have literally no choice.

Would you have taken a moral stance against automated telephone switchboards or online shopping?

I never recalled seeing a wall run in Quake, and now that I’ve looked it up, I think it’s the same words to describe two different things. Less “taking advantage of weird math for optimal speed” and more “kung fu action movie with guns”. They’ve got similar DNA, but this isn’t just Quake. For wall running in particular, think of The Matrix, which inspired GunZ: The Duel; the author seems to think that’s the closest touchpoint. I played the demo a while back as well, and I felt some influence from F.E.A.R., if that helps you.

Out of Action’s big hook is its wild movement set: you can dodge, dive, dive roll, slide, wallrun, and double jump. The only thing you can’t do is, surprisingly, sprint. Getting around efficiently isn’t just about speed—it’s about chaining together maneuvers so you don’t faceplant into a wall and discovering shortcuts across the map.

I think the article makes it pretty clear how this game is different than those.

They might be the biggest dogs in the industry, but there are so, so many games out there that aren’t like that every year.