Gaming with Wine was decidedly far worse before Valve started pumping money into it. Back before Proton was officially announced, there was a silent acceleration in Wine compatibility, getting better a rate we weren't used to, and it's in large part due to Valve partnering with CodeWeavers.

Maybe a few more ads in the middle of the thing I'm trying to watch, with no way to pause or rewind to catch what I missed, will do the trick.

Yeah, you're prone to having one of the biggest drops when you've got one of the biggest peaks. What a garbage article.

Palworld’s next update and early access roadmap are already on the cards, so it’s now up to Pocketpair to keep supporting the game and listening to players to keep them hooked.

NO IT'S NOT. The only thing it's on them to do is to finish it. They sell the game for $30, and this is not a live service game. They don't need to keep anyone hooked.

I haven't started playing yet, but this sounds like the solution is to not position your party near instadeath falls.

I'd be happy to shop there again if they put out Galaxy on Linux. Community launchers are cool, but I want the same support for automatic updates that their Windows customers get.

Oh of course, but I was particularly addressing "gaming with WINE was not that bad before the integration in Steam either", because it really wasn't great, as important and foundational as it was.

Or they've been dying for a different way to play Pokemon than what Nintendo's been selling them for decades.

Not just pausing; it's poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won't be there forever.

I'm not convinced they'll ever realize the problem with their strategy. They'll keep half-assing it every couple of years and wondering why they don't have a larger gaming audience.

Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.

The game isn't bad, but it does feel like it came out of a time capsule from over ten years ago with a bunch of features they tried to implement that their engine couldn't handle. If you have to tell your customers, one on one, why your game is actually fun, you're doing something wrong. Hopefully Microsoft finally makes them throw out Creation and start from scratch for ES6 on Unreal or something, taking a hard look at what their competitors are doing better than them in the RPG space.

Because back in the days of original Xbox and 360, it was a better service than what you got for free elsewhere.

30% is extremely surprising. I'd expect single digit percent gains, if any, on Linux. This 30% difference was in the opposite direction 10 years ago, when Windows had access to low-level graphics APIs and Linux was only on OpenGL. I wouldn't expect there to be 30% worth of frames per second to be tied to Windows bloat.

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

Dot com was a bubble because you could call your company anything with a "dot com" on the end and get funding for it without a business strategy. Indie games never got that treatment.

Teams is for work when your employer got a good deal on Microsoft software and didn't give you Slack or literally any other alternative for voice.

Is it possible to block a domain without blocking the OP? I'm sure they're a nice person, but they post the dumbest rage bait articles, and I'm sick of seeing them in my feed.

EA's launcher still requires internet access though, right? If so, you're probably better off sticking to the GOG versions. I booted up Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, and EA told me "no".

The one that tons of people are enjoying?

I'd say if you're buying it now, you should be doing so based on what it is as though it never gets another patch, because sometimes they don't.

The 3DS and Wii U digital stores were just decommissioned, and preservation is a bullshit excuse?

Play Baldur's Gate 3, one of the two newest Zelda games, or Elden Ring without a walkthrough. You can still get this feeling, but due to economics, you're unlikely to find it in big expensive games anywhere near as often anymore. Smaller indie games can experiment more with this sort of thing. But basically, it's still out there.

It's certainly a looker, and the story is super intriguing for this setting.

Now, unfortunately, let me put my cynicism hat on. It's dusty, because I don't wear it often. Red Dead Redemption II was such a bummer in terms of how much freedom it was allergic to trusting the player with, and while GTA V arguably offered more via heist missions, which were very popular with everyone, it was still pretty limited compared to actual sandbox games, and heists were likely the most expensive part of making that game. Short of a proper demo of the loop of the game showing me otherwise, I'm going to assume that it's business as usual, sticking to the same dated design, because they're probably not going to rock the boat when that old formula still reviews and sells so, so well.

EDIT: By the way, only confirmed for consoles in 2025, not PC. This was stupid and outdated back in 2013 and 2018 too. I'm sure as hell not double-dipping on two versions of the game.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but since this strike is against certain companies and not some entity that represents the entire industry like it does for movies and television, that means that other individual companies who come to an agreement can still hire these people, right? If so...imagine if we had that in movies and television.

We've seen games sold on Epic for less, and people wait to buy them until they're on Steam. I do it myself, even.

No, three years ago they contemplated buying Nintendo or Valve. Activision happened because those two didn't.

"Antiquated" is certainly not a word I've heard anyone describe BG3 with until now. Personally, this is the first year in a long time that AAA has spoken to me, because they haven't been catering to me much for the past number of years.

Yeah, but we already know what those are. These games that we didn't buy yet are new to us and, therefore, shiny.

In the first case that you're replying to, we're using the modifier "vegetarian" in front of the word steak to note why it's different than a regular steak. In your example, you're putting "vegan" in front of steak and lying, because it's not vegan. How many people are actually getting confused by a vegetarian product made to replace a meat-based one, especially considering the veggie one is likely more expensive? Meanwhile, how much more likely do you think it is that the meat and dairy industries would rather there just not be any perceived alternative to their products at all? Because that one seems far more likely to me. I know nothing of the politics of France, but those industries have tried and are trying the same tactic over here in the US.

There are a lot of reasons to love the Mass Effect games, but even after reading the article, my answer to the question it poses is, "Yeah, tons." The things this article cites as novel are pretty much universal to video game enemy design, and I can't think of anything that any Mass Effect game invented here.

Loot boxes are so 2017. It's all about battle passes, engagement, and player retention now.

I'm on Linux, so if I buy from GOG, I don't get cloud saves or automatic updates. If we had Galaxy on Linux, it would be my default store. But it's not on Linux, so I shop on Steam.

"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.

This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.

The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.

It's hard for me to take it that way when the author is citing player count numbers in the headline as though that matters at all in a game with finite content and a low cost of entry. Even you using the word "engagement" in what's meant to be an innocent way just has me thinking about how live service games have poisoned the way people speak and think about video games.

That's not game design. It's the feel of a single mechanic. And honestly, there are so many open world games to play that have driving that feels good.

Honestly, on Proton, performance differences between the two operating systems are a dice roll in either direction, but still single digit percentages like you said.

They can also be some of the best, most engaging, and longest-lasting forms of entertainment

Emphasis mine. Longest-lasting is the one thing live service games are guaranteed not to be, which he gets to later.

The thing that really truly makes a live service game a live service are the updates.

Games got updates before live services, and games today that aren't live services get updates.

Then the author acknowledges the existence of expansions and patches before live service games but doesn't see this as being at odds with his definition. Expansions certainly didn't take "several years" to release back then, like he said, and they still don't take that long now (they still exist, which he also acknowledges). While the updates that came along with World of WarCraft were large and significant, it also wasn't out of the ordinary for PC games to add content like maps and modes for free, no subscription required, because just like today, new content drops bring players back to check it out.

Magic: The Gathering and Dice Throne get regular updates. These are tabletop games. Are they live services? Of course not. They're selling you a product, not providing you a service. The regular work the developers do on those games are just R&D that any producer goes through to make a product. The "service" of live service games are that they're providing the server for you to play on alongside those updates, but the server code is just a part of the product that they withheld from you in order to make you dependent on them and eventually have to spend money. Live services are not services; they're just bad products, because they didn't give you everything you paid for.

The author then discusses all of the manipulation that comes along with live service design, and I too find that gross, but from my perspective, that's just part of the bad product that they built. Chicken and egg. Customers were perfectly capable of the technical requirements of running a vanilla WoW server, and it was only Blizzard's legal department that stopped them.

I think the industry as a whole should be finding a better way to preserve these games and also to provide some legal avenue for paying customers...to continue playing them even when the publisher has thrown in the towel.

Exactly. This is the problem. These companies won't do this unless somehow forced though, because that dependency on their servers means you have to play the game with the lengthy grind that they dictate so that you stay subscribed longer (even though the house rules on the community server speed up the grind to be more fun), stay online longer through manipulation, and keep getting opportunities to spend money in their cash shop. Even games that aren't monetized like a live service do this nonsense, probably out of some attempt to prevent piracy, but it just ends up just making the game worse along with it. I no longer buy or play games that are dependent on an external server; even this definition has some blurred lines with games like Hitman.

It's okay to make a multiplayer game that people may only play a handful of times before putting down, or a single player game that you play through once that has a deathmatch mode attached to it. Some of the most successful multiplayer games of all time, including ones that are still popular today, started as great single player games with multiplayer attached to it. If it really gets its hooks in people but needs some touching up, put out some patches and expansions for it. It doesn't need to keep getting new content forever, and thinking that a game can or should do that is what leads to all of this nonsense. Give us the servers. Give us LAN. Give us direct IP connections. Give us same-screen multiplayer. Sever the dependency on a server that I can't control, or I'm not buying.

If they were, we probably would have seen it by now.

Time limited rewards on battle passes are pretty predatory. They're designed to keep you playing when you otherwise wouldn't want to.

I've got to say...both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they've always made for the past 30 years.