Two groups will 10/10 this game: access journalists and agenda-driven journalists. Everyone else is going to be a bit more critical, especially considering Baldur’s Gate 3 exists and is still fresh.

For me it was Valheim, but BotW is a banger. They make it hard to enjoy games even when they’re actually decent, like Enshrouded and Smalland. You can’t help but feel it’s been done better.

Fair lol. There are other games with good support but it’s the one I played the most in VR

To all the “boycotts don’t matter” people: lol owned. Protest is good and just, and people do notice. Taking action makes a different so get out there and be fucking heard people.

Flight in VR is truly something else. Not even a simpit can provide that level of immersion. You think jumping into a white dwarf system is spooky in Elite Dangerous? Try doing it with a headset on. When your cockpit is smoking, alarms are blaring, and the panic sets in, you will finally understand.

Baudrillard strikes again.

My Steam Deck plays a lot of games, more than I even expected it to. Honestly I’m not sure where this “iffy library” crap comes from.

I still strongly dislike limiting cosmetics so much, especially in a setting where they can mean so much. Darktide’s $20 skins pissed me right off: role-playing is 100% part of the game and that price is absurd.

It doesn’t help that the Rust community tends to bring extremely divisive politics with it in places and ways that just don’t need to happen, starting battles that aren’t even tangentially related to programming.

I’m not buying this game at launch but could be convinced to do so after private servers come out.

No thanks.

Yeah it’s becoming a bit uncanny when I pickup a game and see Mandalore, SplatterCat, or AlphaBetaGamer covering it a few days later.

Even without Steam around, do you really think Average Joe is going to check a bunch of storefronts looking for a game? Nah, they’re going to see what comes up on Twitch/YouTube and then play that. That would have meant nothing but sponsored garbage forever. Steam saved us from that fate with Greenlight and later opening the door entirely (and favouring indies in their upcoming and new lists)

Do you remember Direct2Drive? Opened up in 2004, digital storefront for games run by IGN? No? That’s ok, neither does anyone else, and it had the pull of fucking IGN. That’s the market Steam was launching into at the time, a time when many people were openly exclaiming PC gaming was dying.

At the time gamer chat was a mostly text-based affair over several places and services, and voice was the realm of the few people with the skills to get TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble going or a connection to those people. Steam did something wild and brought the whole community together in one place. All the games, all the gamers, and all the developers in one place.

That’s how Steam ended up a monopoly, and with their collection of mature services no one is going to beat them at everything. If you want to beat them you’re going to need to focus on one aspect of their service, beat that, and then work with other people who have targeted other parts of the service and connect. In other words, you need to do the exact opposite of Battle.net/Epic/Uplay/Origin/etc. but none of those companies will do that because they are too selfish to give up any part of the profits.

Only the FOSS community would have the required mentality and why would they step on Steam? Linux gaming has never been this good. It’s almost like the only people who could take on Steam view it as an asset.

Oh and just to be clear: virtually no other service has even tried to do anything but be a worse version of Steam. GOG and Itch.io instead opted to focus on what made them different and thus occupy meaningful niches, but everyone else continues to be worthless to this day and they only have themselves to blame.

I had a friend refuse to use any 7 Days to Die modlets because they’re “unsafe” despite being simple XML translations. He wouldn’t even use one I wrote myself.

Yeah I enjoyed it for longer than that but it just becomes so tedious once you have a few ships.

I prefer Starsector and Avorion.

My library and tastes are pretty eclectic so I think Steam’s recommendation engine struggles with me lol. That said, I love how it sends me shit no one seems to know about at the time, like Kenshi, Volcanoids, PULSAR, etc.

As I understand it the issue is actually that people weren’t allowed to sell their game for less on other platforms, but they weren’t necessarily trying to sell Steam keys.

Oh wow I’ve owned this game for quite some time. Decent game but ultimately I think Starsector and Avorion are better.

What about GOG and its DRM-free games? What about Itch.io and its exceptionally low cut and pretty much completely open-door policy? There are other services that are good. Origin, UPlay, Epic, and other stuff sucking does not mean they’re all bad.

All I ever wanted was good fights and for that short time where SBMM was actually what it said on the tin, I got them. But then somehow devs started getting it in their heads that what people really want is noobstomping, and while I’m sure some people want that, they can go fuck themselves. That shit made me want to play less because it was too easy all the time, and then when the cheating became too rampant to ignore I just stopped playing competitive shooters.