I still strongly dislike limiting cosmetics so much, especially in a setting where they can mean so much. Darktide’s $20 skins pissed me right off: role-playing is 100% part of the game and that price is absurd.

I’m not buying this game at launch but could be convinced to do so after private servers come out.

No thanks.

Yeah it’s becoming a bit uncanny when I pickup a game and see Mandalore, SplatterCat, or AlphaBetaGamer covering it a few days later.

Even without Steam around, do you really think Average Joe is going to check a bunch of storefronts looking for a game? Nah, they’re going to see what comes up on Twitch/YouTube and then play that. That would have meant nothing but sponsored garbage forever. Steam saved us from that fate with Greenlight and later opening the door entirely (and favouring indies in their upcoming and new lists)

Do you remember Direct2Drive? Opened up in 2004, digital storefront for games run by IGN? No? That’s ok, neither does anyone else, and it had the pull of fucking IGN. That’s the market Steam was launching into at the time, a time when many people were openly exclaiming PC gaming was dying.

At the time gamer chat was a mostly text-based affair over several places and services, and voice was the realm of the few people with the skills to get TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble going or a connection to those people. Steam did something wild and brought the whole community together in one place. All the games, all the gamers, and all the developers in one place.

That’s how Steam ended up a monopoly, and with their collection of mature services no one is going to beat them at everything. If you want to beat them you’re going to need to focus on one aspect of their service, beat that, and then work with other people who have targeted other parts of the service and connect. In other words, you need to do the exact opposite of Battle.net/Epic/Uplay/Origin/etc. but none of those companies will do that because they are too selfish to give up any part of the profits.

Only the FOSS community would have the required mentality and why would they step on Steam? Linux gaming has never been this good. It’s almost like the only people who could take on Steam view it as an asset.

Oh and just to be clear: virtually no other service has even tried to do anything but be a worse version of Steam. GOG and Itch.io instead opted to focus on what made them different and thus occupy meaningful niches, but everyone else continues to be worthless to this day and they only have themselves to blame.

I had a friend refuse to use any 7 Days to Die modlets because they’re “unsafe” despite being simple XML translations. He wouldn’t even use one I wrote myself.

Yeah I enjoyed it for longer than that but it just becomes so tedious once you have a few ships.

I prefer Starsector and Avorion.

My library and tastes are pretty eclectic so I think Steam’s recommendation engine struggles with me lol. That said, I love how it sends me shit no one seems to know about at the time, like Kenshi, Volcanoids, PULSAR, etc.

As I understand it the issue is actually that people weren’t allowed to sell their game for less on other platforms, but they weren’t necessarily trying to sell Steam keys.

Oh wow I’ve owned this game for quite some time. Decent game but ultimately I think Starsector and Avorion are better.

What about GOG and its DRM-free games? What about Itch.io and its exceptionally low cut and pretty much completely open-door policy? There are other services that are good. Origin, UPlay, Epic, and other stuff sucking does not mean they’re all bad.

All I ever wanted was good fights and for that short time where SBMM was actually what it said on the tin, I got them. But then somehow devs started getting it in their heads that what people really want is noobstomping, and while I’m sure some people want that, they can go fuck themselves. That shit made me want to play less because it was too easy all the time, and then when the cheating became too rampant to ignore I just stopped playing competitive shooters.

You would think that the kind of person who loves Factorio knows the rule: never book launch day off.

Honestly anti-cheat is dead going forward because much of the new cheats being developed exist hardware powered by machine learning. Competitive multiplayer is already just a shambling corpse, but somehow people haven’t caught on yet.

My union is doing this kind of thing right now. Start small and creep the action towards disobedience to keep people engaged and willing.

Fuck that, this non-transferrable license shit can go to hell. Going to move more of my purchases to Itch and GOG until someone unfucks this.

I think those craving strategy were some of the earliest adopters of gaming, especially once those games became increasing popular. It’s no surprise then that their numbers would be diluted over time, especially once you start including mobile gamers (who I think are different enough to not really warrant being compared to other gamers). As someone who played some strategy games in the 90s, it was a wild time:

• real-time games like Dune, Command & Conquer, Homeworld, Age of Empires, Myth
• turn-based stuff like Ogre Battle, Fire Emblem, X-Com, Jagged Alliance
• the ungodly amount of grid-based civil war and cold war games and the beginnings of what could be called grand strategy, such as Panzer General, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Star Wars Rebellion, Europe Universalis (2000 but not really a stretch to include imo)
• 4X games like Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion
• stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else like The Guild, Majesty, Carrier Command, Battlezone… (might be misremembering release dates here)

We are still getting a lot of good strategy games even in recent years, like The Last Spell, They Are Billions, Beyond All Reason, half the stuff SplattercatGaming covers…

I imagine that there is a lot of cross-over between strategy, city-builder, logistics and sim players especially if you single out Germany lol. All those genres are “shrinking” if you are only looking at them as a percentage of total gamers, but actually they slowly grow all the time.

Clearly this study is the result of including mobile gamers in with other groups.

You might like Avorion.

Clearly game journos and I are playing different games because things are great so long as you drop AAA (garbage) and multiplayer FPS (cheating).

GPU prices are a bit stupid but I have been playing/buying with a new rule lately and it’s great: if it doesn’t play well on the Steam Deck, I just don’t buy it. Problem solved.