Thanks. I’ll have to give it a trial run at some point soon.

For me, I think the thing that keeps Bluesky usable is that I can use it as a straight linear feed without an algorithm. It’s not truly federated, but the thing I’m always thinking about is that gag in South Park where they burn down the local Walmart and accidentally turn Joe’s Drugs into the new Walmart. Bluesky is safe from that as long as I’ve got the algorithm-less feed. Plus, Mastodon still works, always will, and I still use that too. Even if Discord users migrate to some other closed platform, it gives open alternatives more time to catch up to the most important features before that new platform takes a turn, too.

Migrations like this happen when the other thing sucks. Linux usage even on Steam has tripled in the past four years, and these days if I’m not coming across a PewDiePie or Linus Tech Tips video about switching to Linux, I’m hearing my least tech savvy friends come to me to say I was right for the past 9 years and that their next PC is going to run Linux, if not a Steam Machine. People switch to Bluesky or Mastodon when Twitter becomes all bots due to incentives that Musk put in place, or when his company-sanctioned AI generates CSAM. People will switch off of Discord when enough is enough, and requiring ID uploads to a database that will certainly be hacked one day could be it.

Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every joint possible.

That’s 100% what it is. It also sincerely makes me not want to use Discord, because even if this is what governments want, it’s extremely bad for users.

That’s cap.

I can convince my friends to try lots of things if I take care of the hard parts. Discord’s changes are not going over well in our server, so we’re looking for the parachutes. I understand it depends, but would you say it works well enough? Or is there even some other hack we can run where I’ve got OBS open in another window sending a stream out to something that isn’t Twitch, like our own video clients? If that’s easy enough to do, I could even convince my friends to do that.

How well does Matrix / Element work for screen sharing games?

How does it handle game windows? Presumably TeamSpeak cares more about such a use case, but I have to ask. How well does P2P screen sharing work for a group of about 10 people?

I’d like to see a 2026 release date for Marvel Tokon, even though there’s a very real possibility that PSN screws with Linux compatibility on PC.

Intergalactic isn’t due out for at least a year still, so we might see it, but we might not. Behind the scenes, there’s also that new sci-fi project from Sony Santa Monica that Cory Barlog has been working on, plus a Greek God of War 2.5D metroidvania from another studio. A release date for Wolverine is pretty likely, and we’ll probably see more of Saros, given how imminent its release is.

From third parties, aside from just seeing brand new announcements for games we didn’t know we wanted, which is always exciting, it would be nice to get release dates for the likes of Mina the Hollower and Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement.

Not anymore, but I doubt a graphic like the one they used would have cost a pretty penny.

Sure, don’t update it, and it will continue to exist without further intervention from the developer. We used to get this all the time. A multiplayer mode that isn’t expected to continue to grow or maintain an active player base month after month, because that’s an absurd goal to hit that only a lucky few will ever succeed at under the best of circumstances.

Xbox doesn’t really do exclusives, but that’s worse than doing “exclusives” that end up on PC months later?

Although spin-offs and even an MMORPG then surfaced, there were hopes that a new single-player title would arrive as soon as 2027.

I think plenty of Horizon fans would be just fine if they integrated a non-live-service multiplayer mode alongside the main single player mode, but AAAs have just about forgotten how to make multiplayer modes that aren’t live service.

If it results in less or worse work getting done, we’ll either see it manifest as the customers and it will affect my future purchasing decisions with no harm to what I’ve already bought, or they’ll stop drinking the kool aid. I worked on a game project with a die-hard NFT believer, and even he eventually backed down on trying to shoehorn them into the game after it was clear they were more controversial and less productive than monetizing the game with more ordinary methods.

Yeah, you nailed it. Hitman in particular is a weird one, because you can play through every level start to finish without the online checks, but the online unlocks allow you to keep replaying them with new loadouts, starting points, targets, etc. The extra content is a major part of the appeal. Fortunately for preserving those games, the community has reverse engineered the servers, but that doesn’t make me want to reward IO Interactive with my money for making it so that I need to rely on community fixes.

You do what you want. My headache right now is that I can’t tell if any multiplayer game I buy will be playable indefinitely into the future, and this is a headache I have with both of those stores. At least I know the single player stuff on GOG will be mine with far less effort than relying on a community maintained wiki somewhere for Steam. That you can name a select few examples that were immediately caught doesn’t shake my faith in what GOG promises on the tin. CDPR is just a matter of one hand not talking to the other, not trying to sneak a fast one by people.

You’ve got instances of DRM that you can count on your fingers that have all been reverted because what was easily identifiable DRM 20 years ago is a fairly blurry line these days. My own line has had to be redrawn several times, including for Hitman, because new games keep on coming up with new ways to screw with ownership.

I don’t care much at all that they used an AI generated banner ad for a store sale, but plenty of people do, and it was predictable that they would. If they wanted to save money, it would have only cost them a single game’s revenue to find someone on Fiverr to make a similar graphic.

GOG just had an AMA and they had a cheeky answer for FF7 in particular that makes it sound like it’ll be in the next batch or that the ink is dry on the deal that will bring it to GOG.