I really enjoyed Apex when it came out, it felt like it had a lot of potential and a universe ripe with content to explore.

Then at some point they decided that all we needed was more skins to spend money on.

And appallingly it seems they were right.

The workshop is an interesting topic and one if like to see a larger discussion around - theoretically people are free to upload their workshop content outside of Steam altogether, but arguably it’s on developers to support importing non-workshop content.

Censorship is definitely something that needs sorting out. I hadn’t heard of much censorship going on but I can definitely see it happening, giv n Japan’s standards can differentiate massively from America’s. Clear rules need to be laid, and I hope clear reasons are given when it occurs.

It got added when they moved from Greenlight to the current system IIRC.

Double checked and it’s called the “Steam Direct fee”, is $100 (+ potential taxes) and you get it back when the game makes $1,000 “Adjusted Gross Revenue”.

I’m with you on all of this. I’m familiar with this (am a game dev) and you’re 100% right that the biggest cost is game distribution. One thing though: it costs ~$100 to list a game on Steam, which is returned to you after it’s made a thousand or two.

Honestly there’s nothing much valve can do to appease people, but I believe the most likely thing they can do is release data on how much distribution costs and give companies the ability to disable the “extra stuff” to save even a few percent of their revenue.

That’s on developers for not putting their games on other platforms, Valve do not prevent you from doing so. If they went crazy tomorrow, people can just jump ship.

I swear the only games that could never be on another store would be Valve’s own. It’s really not their fault that other platforms are so bad or niche.

Like realistically what should they do to not be seen as gatekeepers? Become worse to scare developers and customers onto other platforms?

Are they gatekeepers though? It’s not like they own Windows or Linux and stop you from using any other store. Just having the biggest audience doesn’t make them gatekeepers to the market.

I never see people talking about what valve should change other than lowering the 30% cut, but arbitrarily forcing that would set a bad precedent.

Instead of virtue signalling here’s reasonable things Valve could do:

• allow developers to chose what features of steam they use for each game, allowing them to lower the cut by individually opting out of forums, workshop, cloud saves, achievements, inventory items etc
• offer a purchase = one time download with no drm (still legally one copy) for the closest thing to “owning” a digital game
• allow someone to inherit a steam account

Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure proton is free to use and you can install stores and games not from steam on a Steam Deck, so again I really don’t know what they’re gatekeeping.

Deceive Inc. is such a good game. Charming characters and an art style that really immerses you in a fun way. They learnt a lesson really quickly that’s taken so many other games years to get right - buff the weaker, less fun stuff rather than nerfing the fun, overused things.

It’s just a shame that the multiplayer only market is so saturated at the moment with games trying to monopolise your attention. To even get people to try it is difficult due to the entry cost - which is a fair £17.

Not a silly question! The answer is technically yes, but not really.

Considering there are still sites that store plaintext passwords, there has to be some that just hash it and call it a day. For those, once you crack the hash, you know everyone with the same hash has the same password. Any real site does some more complex stuff to “personalise” each hashed password.

The real issue is when you reuse the password and it gets cracked once, people will try that with your email for other leaks and live sites. If a lot of people use the same password (like “password123”), they’re likely to try it as one of the first guesses to crack any new leaks.

I’m oversimplifying my already oversimplified knowledge of basic cryptography, but it’s a really interesting topic!

HOLY SHIT you have no idea how long I have been trying to remember this game. A cousin showed it to me when I was young and I loved it. Next time I saw him he’d forgotten, and I never could find it when I finally got a PC!

I can’t believe it’s been under my nose this whole time (Paladins fan) and it makes complete sense. Thank you for unlocking a core memory 🙏

I don’t imagine the average user has a bunch of enderpearls suspended around their world.

The real performance changes we should be keeping an eye on are the redstone ones. We’ll see how good those end up being and how many contraptions they break.

“Bold” is certainly one way of putting it.

It’s not exactly fair to pretend like this is a good risk to take. If you take a beloved IP you better make something that the people who love it would like. From the trailer I don’t think they even knew who their audience is. From the humour to visuals this was not made for the people who love Minecraft.

Don’t forget about moderation. It’s all fun and games until someone starts posting hate speech, copyrighted material, porn (legal or otherwise) or worse…

better cuts for devs upper management

Everything about this project is amazing, but the documentation is something else. It is written so perfectly concise and yet easy to understand, gives example code just when you’d need it (and 90% of pages have C# variants and includes notes on how it may differ!) and so you just walk away knowing exactly what to do, or with a link to another useful, beautifully written page with what you actually were looking for instead.

I used to think Unity had good documentation, but now that I’ve seen this it’s just on a whole new level. It also genuinely makes me weep when I go back to work in a proprietary engine with such scarce notes that it’s easier to look for other places it’s used and spend a day writing your own for the poor souls who come after…

TL;DR Whoever writes the docs, I love you

Sometimes I feel like me and the people I play with are the only ones who like this game. I’m just glad that the team is committed to improving it rather than writing it off as a flop immediately.

I used to really love this game. It has so much potential to be more than a battle royale, but it took like 4 years to get a permanent non BR gamemode. Battle passes only work if your players don’t get burnt out… And don’t get me started on collection events 2: electric boogaloo, this time with more gambling!

As a casual who didn’t start playing shooter games until late, if it wasn’t for SBMM I wouldn’t be playing them at all.

The real evil is engagement based matchmaking. I don’t want to beat players even newer than me every time I haven’t won in 20 games, and I certainly don’t want to be steamrolled by players who have been playing their whole lives when the same happens to them.

Don’t let any TF2 fan hear you call Deadlock its successor. It appears to be Overwatch gameplay mixed with Moba style map layouts.

But yeah HL:A was indeed amazing.

I only learned about Everything recently, and damn I was impressed. I can’t believe I’ve been putting up with Windows’ default search for so long.