ampersandrew

@ ampersandrew @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

22小时前

As The Division 3 development continues, Ubisoft announces layoffs at Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Stockholm as part of 'a proposed organizational restructure'
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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 22小时前
On the bright side, it's never been easier for extremely small teams to put out something relatively high quality on the side.

2天前

The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

Linux is where it is because companies that care about making money contribute money to make it better. The same goes for projects like Blender. Linux became immensely more usable for the average user because Valve wanted to ensure that they'll be able to continue making absurd amounts of money in the future regardless of what Microsoft decides to do. The licensing of open source software ensures us that we don't even have to trust them to not pivot to BBQ sauce tomorrow, because the work they've already done will continue to serve us.

I personally have no problem with a profit motive on its face, and the above is why. If you want an easy underhand toss for something to criticize Valve for, it's that their motive for profit encourages them to continue to exploit a loophole in our gambling laws to create a generation of underage addicts. They can simultaneously be the company responsible for breaking down walled gardens and creating a better personal computing tomorrow; and also the company profiting off of child gambling addiction that governments are too slow or too unwilling to do anything about.

2天前

72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

I don't see it, especially since Steam got to where it is now by stealing customers who rejected that same price hike on consoles. Everyone learned that Steam sales offer deeper discounts than digital purchases on consoles' walled gardens and that online is free. If customers are savvy enough to do that, they're savvy enough to find other storefronts in a world where Steam sucks. As I see it, anyway. I think I'd have to see the world change in a substantial way to believe otherwise.

2天前

72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

But I think that being forced to abandon Steam, which is for sure an option they all have in a world with GOG and Epic, is exactly why Valve doesn't really have that power. As soon as that guy sees the $5 lemonade, he's going to hear the other guy yelling that there's a dark alley selling it for $1 around the corner.

2天前

72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

Do you believe Steam has the power to raise prices when those prices are set by vendors on their platform and there are at least two other major players? I suppose they have the power to try to exclude competitors, but those competitors would be buoyed very quickly by Valve attempting to do so. And even still, plenty of the biggest games in the world (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, League of Legends) aren't on their platform already.

2天前

72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

A monopoly is defined as being the only seller, so I don't think you can be one without being the only seller. But our laws (are supposed to) target companies that use anti competitive practices to drive the market closer toward that being true. There's at least one suit that alleged it, but they had a difficult case to prove it. Valve doesn't deal in things like locking up exclusive titles that make it harder for others to compete.

2天前

The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

The advantage to Epic's is that they offer cross play for free. I'm honestly not sure what the problem is.

2天前

72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

I don't think the presence of the library on Steam is doing that much work here. Epic's been giving games away for free for five years to alleviate that issue, but it doesn't work. And ultimately, you have to ask: what's in it for me to buy a game from Epic when I get better features on Steam? On GOG, I have an answer to that question, but on Epic, I don't.

2天前

72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

They were declared monopolies because they were determined to have used anti-competitive practices to cement their market position. Valve does not.

2天前

The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

The one that stuck out to me was Metaphor: ReFantazio. It has Denuvo, but the message didn't identify it as such and read like Steam DRM. Dragon Ball FighterZ has no listed additional DRM on the Steam store page, but if I booted up the device offline then tried to run the game, it would refuse to boot until I went online. I ran into it a few other times other than that, but don't recall which games they were. Sometimes it's just an unlucky roll of the dice with when Steam decides it's time to authenticate the game again.

Then there are other DRM schemes, like Ubisoft's and EA's, that are even worse. At best, they require you to explicitly set your Deck to offline mode before traveling; just not having an internet connection isn't good enough.

2天前

The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

They've got some of those things. They recently added a workshop equivalent, and they've had a multiplayer SDK for a long time. The multiplayer SDK is actually a problem, because it means multiplayer often only works on Galaxy, which is just DRM by another name.

And Steam's DRM was pretty invisible to me until, ironically, I got a Steam Deck. Then I started running into games that needed to be authenticated while I was on a train with no internet.

2天前

The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

No, I wasn't. I clicked the title. The link points to a JPEG. Maybe it works differently for you on your UI than it does in lemmy.world?

2天前

The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 2天前

Something's up with your link. It's just the GOG logo for me.

EDIT: This appears to be the article the OP intended to link.

3天前

Pet Peeves with Games?

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 3天前

Ah, I see. In a lot of games, tutorial, story, and gameplay are happening all at once. Do you have an example offender that was on your mind originally?

4天前

Pet Peeves with Games?

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 4天前

Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency.

Right, but the style has point values assigned to you. If they're unchanging, there is a way that will always work best, every time. At a high level (correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm somewhat new to this genre), rewarding style is similar to rewarding variety, juggles, and getting multiple enemies in the same attack. If you go down the checklist of your arsenal, you can always hit the variety. If you know exactly how the enemies behave, you can reliably get multiple enemies in the same aerial combo that the scoring system rewards most. The same actions give you the same output, and one of those score values will be the highest out of all other possible options. One set of actions will reliably always handle the same mob if it's deterministic.

Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.

That's just damage. The rest of the fighting game is rock paper scissors. A beats B beats C beats A. At round start, what button do you press? There's always some option that beats your option, and that's before we've even calculated the resulting damage. Some of what they're doing is responding to what you've been doing, but the rest of what they're doing is trying to be unpredictable; AKA random. (And that's before we even talk about characters like Faust.)

Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.

That's interesting. As I said, I'm somewhat new to this genre. The short version is that Hi-Fi Rush got me interested in checking out all of the DMC games (minus the reboot), and 5 ended up being my favorite of that series (but still not as good as Hi-Fi Rush).

4天前

Pet Peeves with Games?

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 4天前

I mean, character action games and score chasers do tend to fall in that optimal answer bucket. You're free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works. If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy. And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents' decision making.

4天前

Pet Peeves with Games?

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 4天前

Would you mind listing some of those? Because that's a tough bar to clear.

4天前

Pet Peeves with Games?

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 4天前

The reason they're in RPGs is the same reason they're in any other genre. In a war game, you could be a tactical genius, but the RNG is there to simulate dumb luck, so the game is about forcing you to play the odds, because victory is almost never guaranteed. When the result is deterministic, there can often be a single 100% correct answer, and RNG throws a wrench in that. Something similar can be applied to loot games, where you're rolling with the punches based on what you've found.

4天前

Pet Peeves with Games?

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 4天前

Speaking for myself, the average game got way better when the industry figured out it was better to mix the tutorial with the story. Bespoke tutorials felt like homework, and a lot of people are inclined to skip them, never figure out how the game works, and then come away with a negative opinion of the game. In general, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on this, you can make it exciting by starting the story en media res, so your character is using all of their usual verbs; then you can sidestep that immersion breaking moment by having the button prompts exist in a freeze frame thing, outside of the context of the story, that highlights the action it wants you to do. Do you prefer the bespoke tutorials that we got in the likes of 90s PC games? Do you like the way Gears of War does it, where it still keeps it contextual in the course of the story, but they very clearly give you an option to say that you know what you're doing?

4天前

Pet Peeves with Games?

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ampersandrew @lemmy.world 4天前

Money changed hands, so they have to show them. It's advertising for the other companies that they worked with, or building up brand recognition for the publisher, etc. In the best case scenario, they mask a load screen, but I've found plenty where they don't even start loading until after the unskippable logos.