As someone without aphantasia, I don’t always quite get it either. Reading is often a last resort medium for me, but it does have it’s place. Plain text primarily engages my narrative imagination (where is the story going) and only a little bit of visual imagination (since it’s kind of hard to convey certain things like body language in text without being very boring), while for example a video might invoke narrative, visual, and auditory imagination. Video games are even better to me, as they engage narrative, visual, auditory, and decision making imagination. It’s about stimulation to me, the more coherent the better, and books just don’t seem to stimulate enough for my imagination to kick off to where it’s enjoyable to read.

“I’ll have you know my great-great-great-great*10⁸ ancestor turned into oil recently, have some damn respect for my deep family history!” /s

Outright bans never work with vices.

It can’t be taken 1:1. Vices being banned in the past was typically because legislators saw them as productivity drains, despite the pleasure it provided. Therefore making those bans inherently tyrannical to habitual users and certain non-users, incentivizing disobedience.

But this time, it’s being banned for a group that’s not habitually using already, meaning extraordinary reasons would require them to become habitual users in the first place. And smoking is typically not very pleasant at the start to begin with, so there’s little incentive to start. And, unlike in the past, smoking is no longer present everywhere. And of course there’s the knowledge that it will give you cancer and cut your lifespan.

There’s just not much enjoyment left, so even if 1% of those affected by the rolling ban slip through the cracks with an underground market, there isn’t the room for growth that sustains or spreads an illegal market like for eg. recreational drugs. Which is why those bans need to be enforced to perfection to have a chance to work, which they never do, and which is why they never work.

There are so many ways for people to harm themselves that we don’t need to ban because they come with severe risk to the person, so they self regulate. The only reason smoking needs that ban is because of how widespread smoking was, and so even if way less people start smoking than before, that’s still way too many people. A ban just needs to be successful at getting far less people to start, not absolutely halt every single usage, and eventually it will fade from culture on it’s own.

EDIT: Slight corrections. But kinda wild to get overly downvoted for the thing pretty much everyone else is saying in this thread, just with a little more in-depth analysis. Come out and tell me where I’m wrong, I don’t think you can.

The brain worm is already at it

Lmao, LoL might just be the perfect game for you. Nobody’s offended, snowflake.

Well, if you’ve never heard of it, then it must never happen! You should know this if you play LoL, because they give your messages that your report has resulted in a penalty. Unless you never report anyone toxic.

This is not toxic, it’s acting like a child, which will never be bannable. Normal people aren’t bothered by that.

Normal people aren’t bothered by it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t toxic, on top of being childish. Besides, children too need to learn that behavior isn’t acceptable. Pretty sure you can easily survive getting spat in the face too, but I’m sure you don’t think we should normalize that either if some brats do it.

Is it said purely to attempt to denigrate other people’s self worth? Yep.

Is it not said in a situation where it could be considered trash talk and your words could come back to bite you in the ass? Yep.

Congratulations, that’s pretty simply toxic, and cowardly, and childish. And you should really wonder if you want to be defending it in this thread of all places.

Plenty of games will actually ban people that consistently act toxic yes. Maybe not if you do it once or twice. I’m not sure why you think that’s so crazy. Even LoL itself if you do it enough and people consistently report you for it.

It is actually the game’s fault. Mutes and blocks are a last-line defense, not a first-line defense. Others games do proper moderation and will properly foster a positive community, and while they might have toxic people in them, they cannot be toxic as freely as LoL allowed them to be. Unless you are like, comparing it to a Call of Duty lobby, which is a meme on it’s own for the same reason. League is starting to get around to banning people more actively but they should have started over a decade ago.

Player to player interaction is very important for people to enjoy multiplayer games and it’s one of the reasons for people to prefer them over single player games. You can’t always know who’s an toxic moron ahead of time, and it’s unreasonable to cut out all of the primarily positive interactions with people because of a few idiots who act like schoolyard bullies and try to put everyone else down at any moments and create a negative atmosphere. Trash talk is fine, but the kind of people that say “EZ” often do so at times where they’ve already won. In other words, they’re punching down, and they’re bad winners.

If you do that at a real life event, you’re not going to be welcomed back. Because if you ain’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. And for multiplayer games to survive you need both good winners and good losers, otherwise the only people that eventually stick around are the toxic ones, and the game will die or just be known for it. Like LoL is.

E for Everyone 10+

Careful now, kids might have some critical thinking skills by then.

There’s some key details to not forget.

Factorio essentially kickstarted the genre. Satisfactory was inspired by it. I totally dig what Satisfactory has done but having a blueprint that is proven to work is skipping a lot of risk.

There is an inherent tradeoff between graphics and gameplay. Both have good reasons to focus on. Factorio has optimized it’s graphics and logic to an insane degree. Far beyond what is typically expected of an AAA game. You just don’t see that directly, since it provides value by absence. The game doesn’t even start to slow down until you are hundreds or thousands of hours in.

There is a reason AAA games frequently run badly even on top tier hardware, it’s because they prioritize graphical fidelity over all else. Optimization is often an afterthought, since programmers are expensive, and optimization doesn’t provide the immediately apparent value that graphics or new features do. Factorio had to take that risk though, because the game would not be fun if it couldn’t scale past the first ten hours.

Highly detailed graphics are very skillfully produced as well, but it’s a misunderstanding that a game’s code cannot be of similar quality and depth. A sort of graphical AAA vs functional AAA. Factorio took a lot of highly skilled programmers to pull off, while a graphically intensive game put those resources into their artists.

You are right, when Gabe dies, that will be a huge point of uncertainty where people’s trust into Steam will need to be re-established to keep going as it currently is. But that’s a point aside.

Companies do not have to indicate when they are going to enshitify. It can and has happened over night.

It can happen, but it’s not the norm by far. Reputation is still to some companies their key indicator of profitability, and Steam is certainly one of those. By that logic you should at any time be expecting loot boxes instead of products in your supermarket tomorrow, but that’s kind of ridiculous because everyone would hop to a competitor immediately, assuming no foul play. As I mentioned, paying customers hold a firm grasp of the value of Steam. If the people stop coming to Steam, the companies do too, and Steam dies.

Kinda presumptuous to call it naive when I never said Steam couldn’t ever die, nor do I believe so. I’m saying that unlike other platforms that enshittify, paying customers hold the final say for Steam. Paying customers are why companies come to Steam, paying customers will not spend money on Steam if they even get close to enshittifying. There is no multi billion dollar ad industry in between that pays the bills, that dictates the enshittification because it demands advertisements be shoved down people’s throats.

I agree, though this was in the time when he wasn’t really crazy. But two things can be true at the same time, and I wasn’t trying to make a point in that direction. I could’ve picked other examples of developers that kept a level head, they would just be much less known and would’ve made the point harder to get across.

(Not the previous poster) The real issue is that pretty much as always when this comes up, nobody is really defending Gaben. But to some people, just pointing out that something isn’t quite logical or true, is the same as “giving them the benefit of the doubt”, because it’s doesn’t meet their sky high criteria of negativity for the subject.

The truth doesn’t matter to them, but how negative you are about it. If you’re not personally crafting the guillotine for Gaben, you are a fanboy. It’s frustrating, since I do think we all agree at the end of the day that Gabe should be held to high standards due to his wealth, and he should face incredibly scrutiny if he should tilt.

Holy shit dude, go to bed and dont text your ex.

You really need to take a good look in the mirror, because you are reading things that aren’t there and embarrassing yourself and the industry you claim to care about.

Unfortunately for your bad faith argument, I make games myself. And this kind of behaviour is absolutely detestable if you ask me. Engaging with people like this presenting yourself as someone in the industry is actively doing damage to game developers’ reputations. You aren’t automatically right for having been part in making a game once.

PC developers don’t work for Steam, they work for themselves or for a publisher. And the same massive studios that make games for consoles make them for PC too. Feel free to provide some actual stats that aren’t just your personal feeling on the topic rather than just saying “nuh-uh” while running off with the goalpost.

Challenging biased views, half truths, or having your own opinions isn’t kissing some billionaire’s ass. I don’t want billionaire’s to exist. Gabe shouldn’t need to be a billionaire. But all of this is absofuckinglutely irrelevant to whether or not Steam is a good platform, unless Gabe was wielding Steam in a way that would promote a billionaire class, which he isn’t.

Exactly. And unlike many other companies there isn’t even any indication they would want to enshittify anyways. Why would they destroy the foundation of their platform? They have actual paying customers paying the bills, not some force-feed ad slop machine.

Epic made it very clear from the start they were trying to undercut Steam, not by being better, but by paying out developers to create exclusive games for the Epic store, something extremely hated on PC. Even on Steam you can still sell your games elsewhere too.

Steam also controls the larger markets share of PC gaming. Of course they’re going to have to price themselves competitively. Because why would you pay more for a platform that has way less users and a bad reputation?

You can actually just pay an almost 0% cut by delivering directly to your customers, but that’s exactly why you use a storefront to sell your game. You go where the customers are, and they are at Steam.

BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.