MudMan

The Beginning got TONS of crap when it came out. DK2 as well, although a bit less so because it’s less of a departure.

I’ve gone back to both since and I agree with you that Populous was way ahead of its time and holds up much better than other strategy games of the time.

It is exactly the same beast. The beasts are the same. It’s the same picture.

I mean, respect to your extremely wrong preferences, friend. Not everybody has the same use case. I’m not too sure who feels the need to come all the way out to do PR for a multibillion dollar corporation specifically on the basis of not being super into playing the stuff they buy from them, but you guys are clearly out there and I hope you are living your best lives. I’m not gonna say the cultish vibes one sometimes gets from the Valve apologia aren’t concerning, but if it works for you it works for you.

For the record, I don’t even dislike Valve. They’re just a gaming first party like any other gaming first party. I buy stuff on Steam just like I buy stuff on PSN. It’s all good. And I do like most of their first party stuff. If they ever decide to get back in the business of actually making games I’ll probably check them out.

Also for the record, I do download and back up everything I buy on GOG. It all goes to the same backup space where I dump my BluRays and my CDs. And I absolutely have purchased most of the 2000+ games I own on GOG through sales, so I don’t know about the value part either. Just today I played a 30 year old game and bought a brand new game from 2024 on GOG, so…

Well, most of these run on Dosbox and you can download DRM free installer packages directly from their website, so there’s that.

But the Linux gaming crowd here keeps telling me how well Lutris and Heroic are supposed to work when I explain to them that I use a Windows handheld while my Steam Deck is gathering dust, so I’ll point them to this next time instead of just telling them those don’t quite do it for me.

All joking aside, yeah, I’d love GOG having a better client overall, including a Linux port, but the quality of the packages and the lack of DRM easily trump that, so still buy these on GOG.

All of these were already on GOG.

Buy them there instead.

It’s not a matter of science vs belief, it’s a matter of law versus dogma.

Law is a consensus that, at least in a democracy, aims to set some rule and the consequences of it in advance so that whenever a case applies it is at least relatively predictable and applied equally in each case.

If you pass judgement based on the things you like, or in the religious beliefs you profess you’re not following the law, your imparting dogma. Imposing it, in fact, over others.

You can absolutely make unjust laws, but at least those are the result of a process. In a democracy you can at least understands what steps lead to rectifying an unjust law.

If a person with power decides they don’t like you and they apply that belief inconsistently, irrationally and without following consistent rules there is no recourse or path for society to correct itself (beyond violent revolt, presumably).

Judges don’t need to listen to their heart. Judges need to apply laws generated in a functional system that captures the will of an informed people in a predictable, equitable manner. Judges ruling based on personal beliefs, whether you agree with them or not, are a tyranical manifestation and a very scary thing.

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

I’m not sure about the digital-only stuff, but the OP is specifically talking about yt-dlp as an alternative to ripping the BRs, and I have to agree that ripping the disks will be easier and yield better results.

Hardware availability is the trickiest part, especially for UHD, but if you have a drive that will deal with the disks you have I certainly wouldn’t bother with the stream rip.

But hey, as a fallback, it’s good to have the option.

For straight revenue, yeah, that’d be right. Technically everything else is a rounding error. But if Epic was one of those single game unicorns like Riot or Rovio this would not make much sense. The synergies of Unreal with both the movie and theme park buisness for Disney seem like a better fit. I mean, assuming the move makes actual sense, Disney is out there talking about game collaborations and it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve spent money randomly and poorly in the gaming business. I just think the investment would make sense even if Fortnite wasn’t in the mix.

And either way it’s being blown out of proportion by the news because they haven’t even bought the company. 1.5B is what? 10% as much as Tencent owns?

I’m not sure what you think “our” game is.

I mean, in my game there is a functioning rule of law where separation of powers is real and universal access to the justice system is enforced regardless of income level. In that game when you set a rule that rule is applied across the board. And yeah, if the system is not playing that game you’re supposed to make it play it.

Is that the game? Because it’s a good game.

That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

Ah, great, we should just let them run with it and never try, then.

I swear, defeatism gets me so bad. It may just be the most conservative power at work, along with “all politicians are the same”.

Incidentally, anybody thinking about a class action over Sony removing lifetime access to Funimation movie downloads? Because it’s the second time in a year they risk it on that one and I deeeeefinitely want to see that tested in court.

I… yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That’s your line.

Alright.

Hah. The framing from normie news is so weird. It’s “bizarrely Disney is investing on Fortnite”, instead of “Disney buys a stake on the people making Unreal, which at this point is like half of their and everybody else’s VFX pipeline”.

I wonder if the gaming news guys will have a better picture or the “Disney Fornite whaaaa?!” angle is what people will take away from this across the board.

I mean, good luck getting past entertainment industry contracts.

But also… please, please, PLEASE make it so that political opinions and conspiracy theories can’t be used to fire people. I double dare the CEO of a social media network, an electric car company and an aerospace company create a labor market where you can sue for discrimination for that reason.

I mean, I only want to see it if I can reset the timeline back to this point, but still, I REALLY want to see it.

Ah, welcome time traveller. Can you take me back to 2008 with you? It was so much nicer there.

Seriously, every multiplayer game I’ve played the last few years has cross-platform play, both them and Sony have been making PC ports for ages and the reason I own a Series X is that it’s quietly the best set-top media player out there, price-to-performance, and a cheap, convenient platform to play games on a TV.

I mean, if this is a prelude to them no longer making hardware I’d be bummed out, but not for those reasons.

No, listen, get with the program. You’re supposed to be very, very mad that a brand is losing its exclusives. You’re also supposed to be very, very mad if any PC storefronts ever fund a game to sell as an exclusive, unless they’re Steam. You’re also never supposed to acknowledge the contradiction.

You’re being a gamer wrong.

It’s all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use ~ and | as commonplace characters.

FWIW, I don’t even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I’m using constantly, it’s all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it’s not what I expect.

In fairness, the headlines written around this were generally atrocious, save a few (shout out to IGN and the original reporter, which may or may not have been techradar). Sure, in most of those you could read a more complete quote inside, but… staying at the headline isn’t just a gamer thing. Clickbait is dangerous for a reason.

And also in fairness, the point he’s making is still not great. I mean, he’s the guy in charge of their subscription service, so I wouldn’t expect him to be too negative on the idea, but he’s still saying that it’s a future that will come. Not that all models will coexist, but that a Netflix future for gaming is coming.

But yeah, gamers can be hostile without justification and often default to treating every relationship with the people making the games as an antagonistic or competitive one, which is a bummer. In that context, letting this guy talk was clearly a mistake.

Wait, you get dual physical sims but they don’t repurpose one of the slots for an SD card if you don’t use it? Why? At that point it’s removing a feature just for the sake of it. Well, for the sake of making you overpay for more storage, but still.

Oh, it makes sense. I think there’s a place for subscription services, absolutely.

I don’t think a transition to subscription as the default model for gaming makes sense, though. Which was the point of the question and the implicit goal in the answer. And even if it did make practical sense (if people “got used to it”) it’d be bad for the art form and the industry on the aggregate.