ampersandrew

2

Less incentive, but 1.7% of a huge number of customers may still be profitable.

2

Neat. I was aware of Heroic before, but I haven't heard of this. This does change the equation for me, because now there's a data point that GOG can use to see where my money's going and how they can get more of it. What can you tell me about their refund policy? Are the results on ProtonDB just as reliable for GOG versions as they are for Steam versions of games? Does Heroic pre-compile Vulkan shaders the way that Proton on Steam enforces it? Whatever answers you don't have, I can do some of my own homework, but I'm intrigued now.

4

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

Do you have a source on Heroic getting a cut? I can't find it in their FAQ.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

I want auto updates for my games so close to "always" that you can only tell it's not 100% if you squint a bit. I use Syncthing in other contexts, like syncing emulator saves to and from desktop and Steam Deck, and it's not quite as easy as Steam cloud saves.

8

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

Yes, that's the selling point, but I also value automatic updates and cloud saves most of the time.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

Yeah, but I want things like auto updates and cloud saves as officially supported features rather than something they can revoke from Heroic at any time.

3

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

They don't even need to invest in its development. They just need to integrate it as a launch option.

32

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

Please give us Galaxy on Linux, GOG, so I can shop with you over Steam.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

The question for me is how much less I'm willing to pay for a game that made me wait past GOTY/spoiler season to play it, because I'm not paying $70 for it anymore.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

They're called platform fighters. And I doubt this thing has an offline mode, so no thanks.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

It felt more like a retroactive beta, like taking back a move in chess saying your hand was still on the piece when they realized it wasn't working out.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

Worth noting that Peter Moore does not currently have any insight into what conversations are happening at Microsoft right now, but there are some interesting bits in here.

And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?

That is way more risk for them than it is to just make Game Pass available on more open platforms, and it makes plenty of sense. Sony had something like a $600M profit margin on a $7B investment, IIRC, so those margins are getting slimmer even when you're in a market dominating position like they are.

Somebody gave me a DVD the other day, I have nowhere to actually look at this.

This does reflect what the average consumer is doing, but it's stupid. The movie industry, even more than the gaming industry, are doing their damnedest to make sure I can't ever legally own a copy of the movies I enjoy, and it's doing more to make me stop watching movies than it is to pay them perpetual revenue forever. Perhaps the downward trend in theater attendance is tied to that too, but I'm no analyst. There's certainly no GOG for DRM-free movie purchases, so if there's no Blu Ray copy of it, you're just buying a pass that lets you stream it from someone else's machine that will disappear one day, as Discovery customers on PlayStation just realized.

Gen Z is coming through and they're going, why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I've got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?

And when consoles aren't so streamlined anymore and the price gap between a console and a half-decent PC keeps shrinking. Because development budgets have gotten so expensive, the most popular games are rarely the most demanding ones out there anymore either, so it's not like there's a lot of pressure on the consumer to get a super expensive PC if they want to play games.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

I'm back into Final Fantasy VII, which I've never finished before. I've been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It's very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I've got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I'm lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you're trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I'm hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.

I'm replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I'm not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I'd enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.

I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.

Now that I've finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I'm back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.

Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

That’s no excuse to try to get a user’s account banned.

I'd say it is. They highlight the part of Steam's rules against harassment, and while that's always subject to interpretation, they feel that this counts, and I'm inclined to agree.

The steam group had like 1000 people now it has almost 200,000 after the whole debacle.

Before this group blew up, YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers were already making their bullshit conspiracy theories. People try to paint this as Streisand, but that's ridiculous. The Streisand effect is trying to hide something, which you still seem convinced they're trying to do despite highlighting their clients on their web page and getting listings in the credits of the games they work on. What it looks like to me instead is that:

sensationalist YouTubers paint this company as the devil
this curator is made in response
it gets a natural, human reaction from the people targeted by this group
the YouTubers from step 1 use that reaction to mean whatever they want it to mean

In no way did I foresee a way that this group didn't continue on the same trajectory with or without Sweet Baby responding to its existence.

SomeOrdinaryGamer made a good video highlighting stupidity from both sides.

I've seen one video from SomeOrdinaryGamers, and it was too many, but he's cited in this article as perpetuating the bullshit conspiracy theories, so I'm good.

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

It's not a story when it's a couple of conspiracy theorists making horrifically inaccurate deductions. It's a story when it's hundreds of thousands of people led on by a bunch of horse shit.

3

ampersandrew @kbin.social 2y ago

I think I'd have a problem with it if bad internet super sleuths came up with some nonsense reasons to try to destroy my reputation.