Great in theory until companies start charging 80% of the product price for a single spare part so you’d rather buy a new product than try to repair your existing one.

Huh? My redlib instance broke maybe once this year because I didn’t update it for months. And once I did, it immediately worked again.

If you are talking about the smaller, seperate news window, you can disable that in the settings. My switch (1) also has a news feed but you can decide for yourself which news channel you want to subscribe too, or none at all. For GOG, there is no ad free version of the installer, you’d have to use third party tools or maybe powershell/cmd (I never tried the latter).

I’m amazed that noone here is complaining about the fact that the offline installer for the product you paid for contains ads. Yes, offline ads that do not track you and only for other games on their plattform, but still ads. Not the worst thing in the world, I know, but still annoying.

Palworld has now sold more copies than the original Pokémon Gen 1 (Red, Green, and Blue), which is still the best selling Pokémon generation with 31 Million copies sold.

Redlib is really the last bastion that keeps Reddit usable for me. Once it falls, I will completely quit the plattform.

I recently switched from regular Firefox to Ironfox. So far, I didn’t notice anything different, which is probably a good thing because that means everything still works as expected.

Almost all of my Nintendo games are physical. If I had a Playstation or an XBOX I’d go for physical copies as well. Why? Collector and resell value, also you can’t just disable my physical game, you’d have to come by and physically take it away from me.

On PC, I care less about it. If Steam shuts down tomorrow, I download everything today and unlock it via Goldberg or just pirate it on demand. On console, I either can’t do that at all or it is quite challenging to do so (with some exceptions).

Reminder that Kernel Level Anticheat is still rather easy to circumvent and only raises the bar of entry a tiny bit to prevent some of the most basic attacks. But cheaters who really want to cheat and have no issues with spending some money and/or time can’t be stopped by it. Never, ever trust the client.

If you can bear with the AI voiceover (imo it’s not that bad, you can hear that it’s AI, but it could be more omnoxious), I can highly recommend this video if you haven’t seen it yet: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M

A “voluntary code” os completely useless. No one stopped them from caring without a code in place and keeping games alive hurts profits in the long term so no one will do that voluntarily.

IMO due paid reviews and companies being too scared of getting sued for defamation or similar reasons I also do not trust “professional” reviews any more and stopped reading them. But while less professional and more subjective, I almost always read user reviews on plattforms that allow them like Steam on PC or the Play Store on mobile. At least you can tell if there are some issues that most people seem to hate and then you can judge for yourself if that is a dealbreaker to you or if you’re gonna gice it a shot anyway.

Way better than any review is a free demo for an actual hands-on experience. Or I also often look for some gameplay on YouTube, especially if there is no demo available.

I’ve updated my original post with a testimony proving my point. For this case, I can only guess that it is the same case as with Mindustry: Because they have not been made aware that they are getting a worse deal.

I’ve updated the original comment with a testimony about the topic which also contains an answer for your question:

In the rare occurrences where we’re made aware that the game is being sold on another platform for a lower price, …

I guess no one has made them aware yet.

Cause yes valve does prevent you from selling your game on other platforms at a cheaper rate, so long as you are doing so via steam key or when valve servers will be the source of distribution.

This is false. Even if I put the game up on my own server, letting you download a zip directly from there, cutting valve fully out of the picture service-wise too, I am still not allowed to sell it cheaper on my site then on steam.

Edit: Based on the score of my comment it looks like I need to provide some more evidence to back this up, I thought this was already common knowledge. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view This is just an excerpt of the full testimony, I don’t know if the full file or an unredacted version exists anywhere else, feel free to share if you found one.

The first part is about steam keys, but it starts to get more interesting from page 16 of the pdf onward, so feel free to skip to there. TLDR: According to the testimony, valve does not actively check for price parity, but if they become aware that a game is sold cheaper elsewhere, they contact the publisher asking for the reason for the price difference and may threaten to reduce promotion of the game on steam or straight up remove if from steam if they do not match the price.

I have not found any of the E-Mails that were mentioned during the testimony, but it seems this happened more than just a few times for something “That is not our typical process.”.

+1 for Netcup. I’ve been with them for years and more than happy. Besides my .eu domain, which costs me just 5,04€/year, I’ve also rented a server there and never had into any issues with either, ever.

No impact? Nothing? I mean, they shoud at least notice something, right?

A study published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers, and other executives from firms who responded to various business outlook surveys in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all. Nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the last three years, the research noted.

Well duh, that explains everything. Me getting paid for taking a dump 1.5h a week hasn’t had any impact on my productivity score either. My guess is those 1.5h were mostly used to ask questions you’d otherwise just look up yourself, which also doesn’t change much in terms of productivity.

So far, this bill (and every other one I’ve) seen basically wants to force OS developers to add a birthdate field to your account setup process and an APi to expose this field, which should then be used by other software to obtain your age and limit what they serve you (ads, tracking, nsfe content) based on the legal requirements of your current age bracket. So, no more age gates for every virtual “adult service” you consume, just once on OS setup.

And how to circumvent this? Simple: You lie, just like you did when you were a teen and wanted to access inapropriate content for your age.

Now, if they expand the bill to actually require verification instead of indication, that’s when things will get interesting. But even then, as long as you own a PC and not use a cloud PC, which means that the data is still stored somewhere locally, it can and will be manipulatable and therefore circumventable. How exactly is hard to say without seeing the actual implementation of the affected OS.

One thing to actually fear tho is how Microsoft and Apple will handle this: They tend to overshoot what the bare minimum law is asking for and actual, verified age data can be valuable when harvested in larger quantities, combined with other metrics and sold (think about how many surveys ask for your age or an age bracket). Most of the bills I read do mention “privacy and security when it comes to sensitive user information”, but as we all know: A fee is just another expense when it comes to calculating your net profit from your total revenue…

*while not signed in. Once you do, you’ll get access to the full historical data

Yes, although it is not just about the engine. For AAA story games (think of something like Resident Evil) I couldn’t care less, but anything small scale with great modding potential gameplay-wise, I avoid engines that compile to bytecode like Unreal because they make it insanly painful to create mods. I prefer something that I can easily decompile to look at the souce code like Godot and Unity.

But as I said, that is not just an engine issue, since you can provide official mod support on Unreal or make it harder to mod on other engines using stuff like obfuscation or IL2CPP. But in general, especially on most small-scale Indie games, just looking at the used engine is enough to determine modability and therefore influence my decision.

Something something YouTube’s copyright system is still broken af and easy to exploit. I wonder how much more abuse it takes for YouTube to finally do something