Now we just need a way to use that shelf with the same account so I don’t get booted from my steam deck games just because I left something running on my PC and vice versa.

AFAIK, this is also a licensing issue. When Steam was launching, game publishers were concerned that people would simply share an account. So part of Steam’s licensing agreement is that the same account can’t have games (even different games) running on two machines at the same time. It’s specifically to prevent account sharing, because people would just share an account with their friends; Booting them out of their game every time their buddy boots something up is a pretty effective countermeasure.

The “same game at the same time” part is a licensing issue. It won’t ever be “solved” because it would get Steam into legal trouble to do so, just like the Internet Archive recently FAFO’ed. In order for two people to play the same game at the same time, you need to own two licenses for said game.

But it does solve the issue of multiple people using the same library at the same time. Now your family members don’t get booted off of Skyrim just because you launched Persona. It basically combines your libraries, so any of you can choose any of the listed games to play at any time. Just like having a physical shelf full of CD cases.

You need to be friends for at least 30 days before you can invite someone.

“Secret” is a bit of a stretch. The playtest was offered to nearly all longtime Steam users. If it’s meant to be a secret, someone at Valve is getting fired.

Sure, but that feels a little bit like saying “We don’t need guards inside the prison, because we already have them patrolling around the perimeter.”

It’s important because it allows them to directly modify the CPU’s microcode. Basically, the CPU has its own set of instructions, called microcode, which controls how the chip functions on a physical level. If they manage to change your microcode, even a full system reformat won’t kill the virus; You’ll need to either re-flash the CPU (which is not something the standard user or even power user will know how to do) or replace the entire CPU.

Skyrim, Factorio, and The Sims 3 or 4 (it really doesn’t matter which one.)

All of them are open-ended and player-led, so there’s not a single set-in-stone story to play through and get bored with. All of them have extensive modding communities and support. And there is a variety of gameplay styles, so there’s something to suit various moods.

And all of them are notorious for hooking players. Nobody ever decides to boot up the Sims because it sounds fun; They boot it up on a whim, then come up for air three months later, wondering what the hell happened to all of their free time. Once you get sucked into Factorio, you’ll start seeing conveyor belts in your sleep. I played ~600 hours of it in just a few months, and that’s considered newbie numbers; There are plenty of Steam users who have tens of thousands of hours played.

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I think you dropped these.

At one point I was playing so much Factorio that I started seeing conveyor belts and assembly machines in my sleep

Factorio and RimWorld immediately come to mind. Even with the base unmodified game, you’ll likely get several weeks of gameplay out of Factorio. Then if you dive into modding, you’ll never put it down. Multiplayer is really nice too. And their big DLC just got announced, and is planned to drop in a few months. So now would actually be a great time to dive in, because you’ll get access to the DLC about the same time that you’ve burned through the content on the base game.

There’s also Curse of the Moon, which is an homage to the original 8-bit games. It’s not a modern metroidvania, but if you like the older pre-SOTN Castlevania games then you should check them out.

And that’s exactly why Epic paid for the exclusive.

Yeah, most FromSoft games just feel intentionally clunky to me. Like the difficulty is artificial, purely because your character’s limbs seem to be full of birdshot. It always feels like the character is directly resisting my controls and fighting against me.

But Sekiro did away with all of that. The character feels snappy. He’s not weighed down. I never felt like I lost a fight because of an animation lock, or because my character was simply too sluggish. Every time I lost, I knew it was because I wasn’t fast enough as a player. And honestly, I prefer that. If I’m going to lose against a boss, I don’t want it to be due to some forced windup animation taking too long.

You can hide all of that on your sidebar customization settings, but yeah it’s annoying that it’s turned on by default. The Discover is occasionally useful, but I honestly use Overseerr for discoverability more than I use Plex’s built-in search.

My biggest complaint with Plex is the lack of support for .m3u8 playlists. I want to be able to give it a list of livestreams, and then tune into those via Plex. Plex obviously already has live-streaming support built in via their Plex channels, but they have actively worked against custom livestream playlists, (it used to be supported via an extension, but they removed extension support.)

For those who enjoy this: Dawn of Sorrow is a direct sequel (same protagonist) on the NDS, and is just as good. It’s one of my favorite Castlevania games.

There have been a few famous (or infamous) cases of game devs adding crack checks into their games. Basically, the devs recognize that cracking is inevitable. So instead of trying to make harder and harder DRM methods, they simply started including checks to see if the player was using a cracked copy. If they did, they could change the game in some way. This can actually be fairly effective for the reasons you mentioned: A cracker gets the game to boot, and maybe plays the first five minutes or so. Then they send it out the door without actually verifying anything further. Because they’re rushing to be the first, so they won’t bother doing a full playthrough to ensure everything works. So when the player gets ahold of it, they’re the ones who experience all the issues.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, for instance, made the game increasingly frustrating to play. It would start removing treasure you had already collected, so you had to recollect it. And in a game where your progress is tracked via collections, that means it’s a huge time-sink. And if you somehow managed to get all the way to the final boss, the game would crash and delete your save so you had to completely start over.

Game Dev Tycoon is another example. The devs themselves actually posted a “cracked” version of their game on day 1. So all the various sites grabbed it and started seeding their torrents. It’s a game where you spend time and money developing games. And the cracked version also includes a piracy feature, where as you gain popularity you also see your profits getting eaten by piracy. And the game will slowly ratchet up the amount that you lose to piracy, until it’s eventually impossible to make a profit. Notably, there was no in-game way to combat the piracy or stop it from eating into your profits.

That latter example was used to great effect, because it sent all of the pirates to the steam message boards, to complain about piracy in their games and ask if there was a way to develop DRM to combat it. In essence, they were tricked into ratting on themselves. Because if you were playing a legit copy, you wouldn’t have any issues with piracy.

I mean, Palworld suffered from the exact opposite problem, where the game received basically no post-launch content. So once players burned through the main game, there was very little reason to keep playing.

This just goes to show that support needs to both exist and be something players agree with.

Nice try, NSA.

The largest issue with indie games is simply discoverability. I’m sure there are tons of amazing indie games out there. But you need to wade through a sea of complete fucking garbage to get to them. Meanwhile, AAA studios can spend thousands of dollars on marketing. Unless an indie game goes viral, there’s very little chance that I’ll ever hear about it in order to consider buying it.