I don’t really see it. AM isn’t in a good spot and it’s very unlikely they’ll suddenly become a top team next year. Newey can do his magic but it’s not going to fix the rest of the team.

Max isn’t going to waste his time in some midfield team, he’s going to a top team or he’s taking a sabbatical.

I get hating Fallout 3. I hate how it (and every subsequent Bethesda Fallout game) has done irreparable damage to the Fallout lore. I think its main story is pretty shit and the only reason it’s not a steaming pile of shit is because somehow Fallout 4 was able to surpass Fallout 3 in shittiness.

But you have to have your head pretty far up your ass if you think people wouldn’t actually enjoy it. It’s a good game (a bit dated by today’s standards), it’s just not a good Fallout game. And the people who love Fallout 3 don’t care about the reasons that make it a bad Fallout game.

Honestly, IMO the lack of D-pad was less of an issue than the lack of a second analog stick. The lack of a second stick made the controller almost impossible to use in any game that was designed with 2 sticks in mind. For example Nier Automata 9S hacking minigame was a horrible experience with the Steam controller.

It looks like a giant…

If you no longer ask for a team order that exists, you are no longer a racing driver.

Honestly I’d even prefer that because it diminishes the value of in game purchases and would be a step towards getting rid of them as well.

I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part.

This part is not really what the initiative is about. The initiative can’t guarantee you’ll be able to find 100 other people to play with. Even matchmaking (unless it’s somehow made integral to the game) is not really relevant to the initiative. What the initiative is concerned with is preservation of games. To give a specific example, if you’re able to organize 100 people to play the same game the initiative wants you to have the technical capability to set up the game for 100 people. And to give a more real life example, Anthem is shutting down at the start of 2026. That means if me and my 2 friends get nostalgic and want to play Anthem in 2027 we literally cannot, the game won’t run. But if what SKG wants to achieve would be a reality right now then EA would have to have a way for me to set up whatever is necessary for me and my 2 friends to play Anthem together, be it some kind of server binary or P2P solution or source code or whatever, doesn’t matter how the company wants to solve this as long as it works. That’s what SKG is about.

My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.

SKG isn’t saying companies should make BR-s local/split screen. It’s only concerned with keeping games in a playable state. SKG doesn’t alter the game design unless the technical stack required to keep the game running is somehow integral to the design of the game. SKG deliberately leave the “how a game should be preserved” open so publishers/developers could preserve games how they see fit. If the publishers/developers want to rip out the multiplayer and replace it with local/split screen that’s how they’ve decided to preserve their game. That is not really criticism of SKG, that’s just a bad faith argument that can be made only because SKG isn’t as restrictive as people claim it to be.

And specifically in your example the design of a BR game does not need to change at all because the only thing preventing some BR-s from being preserved is the fact that you cannot set up your own servers.

What exactly is this dramatic change that you think would have to happen?

Never would’ve guessed that the year he’s (probably) NOT winning the championship is the year he shows just how insanely talented he is as a driver. I think this is the third time this year he’s snatched pole with a perfect lap.

Thank god RBR is shitting the bed because Max looks like he’s ready to repeat 2023. No disrespect towards Max but watching GPs to see who comes second isn’t all that exciting.

More than $5-$6. He’s making $300 income which implies the expenses are deducted. The actual price is $5-$6 + actual cost of whatever is in the vending machine

But even then it’s astronomically unlikely to be retroactively enforced. Old games will be grandfathered in and it would apply only to future game releases.

When Stop killing games initiative started one people wanted Pirate Software to support and promote the initiative so others would be more aware of the initiative. Instead of doing that Pirate Software decided to take a massive shit on the initiative essentially making the argument that it would actually end up killing games. Which would be somewhat acceptable position to take, if he hadn’t completely missed the point of the initiative, hadn’t made things never said in the initiative and hadn’t told everyone to eat his ass when people said he doesn’t understand the initiative. That was about 10 months ago when he was still somewhat well regarded in the gaming sphere.

But in the last 10 months he’s been surrounded by controversies that have slowly changed the public perception of him. I won’t get into all those controversies because there are just too many to explain.

So about 2 weeks ago Ross (the person spearheading the Stop killing games initiative) made a video where he decided to more or less vent his frustrations with Pirate Software because he effectively derailed the initiative. That got covered by MoistCritical who sided with Ross and said Pirate Software is talking out of his ass. Any normal person would’ve gone “Maybe I am wrong when everyone keeps telling me I’m wrong?” But Pirate Software literally said he is doubling down on his statements and he has been adamant that his interpretation of the initiative is correct, everyone else is wrong and he has done nothing wrong. Because he’s a narcissistic asshole he has fueled the drama, turned himself into the villain and ended up being the catalyst to having the initiative signed.

There is a chance but what is he convincing them of? That they should take a non-existent exclusivity deal with Steam? They already have the data that exclusivity with Epic does not work and Steam doesn’t do exclusivity deals.

That’s what I mean by artificial exclusivity. There are games where the developer or publisher decided it’s the only platform they will release on but that kind of “exclusivity” is not at all the same as Epic paying developers or publishers to not release on Steam. Valve/Steam doesn’t prevent those games being released elsewhere, the developers/publishers themselves don’t want to.

I could understand smaller (I’m talking literal solo devs or studios with less than 10 people) choosing to be exclusively on Steam. Supporting other platforms can have huge overhead costs for them. But for a studio the size of Gearbox there’s no benefit to being exclusively on Steam. They have enough support staff to manage multiple stores. There maybe be suits wondering if it’s worth being exclusively on Epic but there are no suits sitting around wondering whether to be exclusively on Steam or not, the answer is obviously not.

Why are people taking this even remotely seriously? This is Pitchford doing marketing for BL4. BL3 already showed people don’t want Epic exclusivity and there’s no such thing as Steam exclusivity. They can choose to release exclusively on Steam but that’s just artificial exclusivity because nothing about Steam prevents them from releasing on Epic or GOG.

It’s a pointless poll made by Pitchford either to keep BL4 in the media cycle or to just shit stir, possibly both.

Yeah, I had plenty of time and money for gaming and other hobbies before having little mischievous halflings. Now at least two thirds of my free time goes into them instead of me. Would I love more me time, absolutely. But I also love them and I feel incredibly privileged to have the time that I can spend on them and I can’t fathom not wanting to spend time with them.

But this is more about letting potential future parents know that children are a fucking huge commitment and you better have your own life sorted because you won’t have time to fix your shit later. Kids are post-campaign content. You finish your main story and then if you’re looking for some challenging content, you get kids. Don’t get kids during your main story because then they become your main story.

There are two point I’m going to make. First is that I think it’s something the developer shouldn’t have to decide in the first place. They wanted to make a game with gruesome scenes and that’s the game they made. The only reason they’re making it less gruesome is because they want their game to reach a wider audience which is why they’re porting to console but they can’t release their game on console because consoles are a locked down platform and the platform owners are exerting power they shouldn’t have to force the developers to compromise on their vision. It’s absolute bullshit that Sony/MS get a say in how a game should be made.

The second point is that the developers did have to decide this, so it should be obvious why consumers are annoyed. They bought the product when it had one vision, and now the vision they were presented with is getting altered for reasons not at all related to their experience of the game and they’re not even given an option to retain the previous vision. Imagine if your favorite game was changed for some completely bullshit reason? Would you not get pissed?

Let me give a different perspective. The developers had an original vision of brutality and gore. The developers wanted to expand their game to different platforms. The platform holders said “Compromise on your vision and you can put the game on our platform”.

Do you think that’s okay?

I think you meant bombing posthumous terrorists. Clearly the US has no problem with that.

That’s like saying you boycot Nestle but won’t stop using any of their subsidiary products unless you accidentally find out that a brand not named Nestle is actually owned by Nestle.

You had a bridge to sell to anyone with the naivete to believe it’s the only place AI was used. What about your naivity of believing that other games are not using AI, unless of course you stumble on the information about AI usage? Seems hypocritical to criticize others for giving the benefit of doubt while giving the benefit of doubt to all other developers simply because you don’t know any better?