you have way more Faith than me. 3 months after I have bought played and beaten a game that is titled Half Life 3. then i might start to believe it’s real. I wait the 3 months to make sure Valve doesn’t Delete the game from my stream account and send men with those memory wipe things from men in black movies after I play it. For all i know they have already done it.

yeah but not going to get it. Burn me one shame on them but burn me twice shame on me.

Test Drive unlimited 2 was sadly very limited and dead for a few years now. but it was a nice open world racing game. even if I didn’t want to race I would just go for s drive.

ah cool yeah it was this thing in the US where you connected into rooms that had dedicated servers attached to them but under the hood it was all peer to peer I think that would be a server browser for games that didn’t have that like quake, quake 2 and mechwarrior 2, decent. It was run by sega.

What made it crazy awesome is you generated points by logging in and playing to spend in the heat store and they sold like GPUs like voodoo 2 2000s and gaming mice, etc.

It all crashed in a blaze once people figured out you could just camp in games an minimize and keep generating points.

By that point Half-life and Quake 3 was out and had the server browser built in so it was on the way out anyway.

yeah remember heat.net?

yeah you’re right so it was eventually better than I remembered back then

what kills me is we Solved Cheating in the 90s and early 00s. It’s called dedicated servers. People would buy a game someone would setup a server and if you were a dick or cheat you would get kicked and each sever was like a community just like it is here.

But the companies want control they want to be able to shut download the game on their timetable and get you to buy the next game. A tool or system is never going to fix this people and breaking communities into manageable chunks can.

Hell back in the day servers were hacked on purpose to create new types of games. Anyone remember CS Surfing and Sniper only maps in TFC.

the point is people can hack away break the game beyond recognition but they can do that off in their own space.

Now I know that breaks global leader boards and other ego driven things but I’m just talking about having fun with games.

Steam machines madre the same mistake the 3DO made I’m glad they recovered and something very good camel out of it.

problem is pc gaming never died and has been healthy all along but when retailers stopped selling cause they made more profits with consoles or we stopped buying. the industry or more like the suits and media made a native that pc gaming died. we just went to the guy that respected us and now he has a dragons hord of wealth and moved in beating the consoles at their own game by respecting is with an open platform.

this is what i have been saying all along

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/is-the-total-value-of-unplayed-steam-games-really-19-billion-probably-not/

agreed but barely touch is not the same as never touch that’s why I think they are looking at play time as some kind of real metic where it’s been broken from the beginning. You make a really good point as well about offline can also impact that as well.

alternative headline “steam users have a ton of games they got from a humble bundle for super cheap and we didn’t take that into account and used the msrp value of each game for this shocking headline.”

Also some games don’t count time on older games. i know I have games like half life 2 episode 1 that i have beaten that show I never played them since I played them before they started tracking time.

aa it should be

Can you imagine what it would’ve be like if more companies has these handover moments. Support is officially handled over to the community. People pick up touch and the developers get to move on.

not as big as the whole US but it was big like a low key burnout paradise but bigger

great I will play my copy of test drive unlimited 2 to get ready… oh wait I can’t

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

yes I was

that’s why I hope the game-like genre naming really takes off that means I can just play the original and skip the rest

I have comes to realize it was never about piracy it was about control and always has been. It was not about about real lost sales but shareholder perception of potential gains if they had full control.

They look at Apple and wish they had the same amount of control. Piracy is the small minority they point at to distract people when they take away your freedom to do what you want with the property you pay for.

You think they are thinking how much they could get if they did away with piracy. What they really are thinking is how much they could make if they could make your purchase obsolete the moment they can sell you a newer one to juice this quarters profits and lock you into a ecosystem that you can’t leave.

remote kvm if you are relying on a box that no longer has a network connection you are SOL and need something that can power cycle the box.