This is about micro-transactions specifically. Tim Fortnite is arguing that games sold on Steam should be able to offer in-game purchases with payment options outside of Steam.

It’s very similar to Epic Games v. Apple, where Apple had required in-app purchases for iOS apps, notably Fortnite, to be handled through their app-store so they get a cut.

One big difference that I see here: On PC, a developer isn’t required to use Steam to distribute software. Players often prefer Steam because Valve has made Steam a great option and has lots of good-will with players. Still, Steam does dominate a massive portion of the PC market.

And a 30% cut is high. Especially for smaller games with less financial resources. As a developer, that’s a trade-off you’d have to choose. I think it’d be best to offer the game on multiple platforms.

For Steam-bought games, I think having an option to pay off-platform would be fair, but I think the option needs to remain available through Steam too. For many games, I don’t want to give my payment details to yet another developer, company or third-party.

I feel like this is a good argument for drm-free games and stores like GOG. Not that you as a consumer can always choose that, as many games don’t offer that option, but for the ones that do, there’s less barriers towards playing it in the future or in environments where it’s not originally intended.

There is steamcmd, an official command-line tool— I’ve only used it for game servers, and I don’t know if it includes the Steam runtime/resources, but I know it lets you download games.

You could look at Goldberg Emulator too. I know it’s used often for piracy, but idk about its legality on its own.

Minecraft with 512 chunk render distance or 2048px resolution textures is gonna be fire tho

Nice! I have seen some people who make and sell content on Mastodon— I appreciate those who do that, imo they are able to help fill a hole or just benefit the lives of people who are seeking that content or services/interactions. I hope they’re able to do it safely, seeing as how they probably have to move off-platform for many things, including payment… and with how payment processors treat any adult related transactions…

Unfortunately, that also means that there’s probably not a direct fedi alternative for OF— in my experience (more info below) and from my research, it’s pretty much the default for large creators to rely on paid actors impersonating them for messaging and interacting. Also OF takes care of the payment details, which idk of any fedi platforms doing.

Anecdote: I got lured into an OF a while ago on a local meetup/dating/rp discord servers. I thought I was smarter than that, but weeks of talking and trusting someone, them slowly eroding boundaries and using emotional manipulation… it’s really powerful, unfortunately.

Anyways that OF page was 100% designed to milk people. A “$3 first month” followed by a recurring “$45” regular price if you don’t cancel should’ve been a red flag. And only softcore posts once you subscribe, but as you talk to the actor in messages, they send more intimate images, but with a paywall. They wouldn’t talk to me anymore if I didn’t pay. It starts at $10, but the next was $30. That’s when I refused. It hurt though, I felt like I knew the person. The whole time they’re pushing this “if you don’t buy it you don’t love me, you don’t want to support me, omg I need grocery money” idea.

I know not all creators use it for that. But the platform certainly enables it with its design and features. I just think a massive portion of the adult industry is founded on exploitation, unfortunately.

You’re strawmanning their comment— I’d imagine they’d have the same, if not more, issues with snap.

Flatpak doesn’t integrate well with all systems. For me personally, on Arch, I have to update and store Flatpak versions of some dependencies, like proprietary Nvidia drivers, separately from the rest of my system and its package management system. And it does take up some space to store the runtime too.

Also Flatpaks may require some extra set up and/or workarounds due to their sandboxed environment. That’s not inherently bad and has some big security upsides, but it’s a consideration.

Also I don’t know how well it plays with immutable distros, but I’d imagine there may be similar integration issues there, too.

It’s still probably a lot easier for devs to have a consistent distribution format though, and they are typically more secure, so I’m not saying there’s not merits to only providing a Flatpak. Just pointing out that your reply here was misguided, imo.

Fediverse priority #1: Be able to talk to a paid actor pretending to be a model* Priority #2: Spend money to see the nudes they send in DMs

*for major creators, I’m sure many minor/independent ones are genuine

I know I’m late to reply here, but I’m with you on your edit… I think Lemmy specifically has a demographic that overlaps very little with AAA FPS players, as compared to other platforms. I think the user base tends to be older and less into live-service games. But also, Lemmy/the threadiverse, being FOSS, has a big user base that’s passionate about FOSS software. And that often correlates with being critical of big corporations, products, etc.

Also many of those users use Linux, which this game notably won’t work on because of its invasive anticheat. So many of these replies may be fueled by that, too: Either jealousy of being able to play it, or “moral high ground” for choosing not to. (Note: I am in this situation and my preferred OS is a big reason I am not buying this title).

I don’t generally find it productive, though, to blame any individual consumer for funding a corporation. We live in a capitalist society, and we all have to participate to some extent to even live, often including to the benefit of mega corporations with poor morals and ties. I feel there exists better ways of fighting back against those practices, inequalities and abuses (though the government angle, at least in the US, has been falling real short there lately).

And, honestly, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect anyone to forgo major goods and services from their life, including entertainment, for the sake of morals.

If you thought the game was worth the price, it’s fair to buy it. And tbh, there’s a lot of hype and (imo) good changes with this title, so I don’t blame you.

That doesn’t make the game immune from criticism either— if you couldn’t play it whatsoever at launch because of server capacity and always-online requirements, that’s worth criticizing! And I agree with your post, always-online requirements are such BS for games with singleplayer content. I understand the motivation for the company, but it’s incredibly anti-consumer nonetheless.

Lastly, your post absolutely belongs in a gaming community— FPS games are one of the biggest genres in gaming, and pretty synonymous with “gaming”. And this is a massive release! Sorry that the general response you got wasn’t very positive or kind, though.

Maybe OP knew all along that they wanted to use the previous package list to upgrade and fetch the new one after! Maybe we’re all actually inverting it…

(I’m just being silly, I recognize that an old package list would probably cause issues with installing or upgrading packages.)

Life is Strange, for me.

BL2 even had some PhysX simulations when using an Nvidia card for particles and effects, so between those and running at higher internal resolutions and framerates, it’s already better than the new one in some areas.

The final boss fight of Rust rewrites

I love Bluetuith! It’s my go-to for Bluetooth device management in my setup, since TUI applications tend to integrate really well into my existing theme, since I’ve set up my preferred terminal colors already.

I can imagine this would be a great option now for Windows users who already use the terminal frequently, like devs!

As we already expected, NSFW games being a target was only ever going to be a first step. There’s always more to it.

Well said. This is a good part of why I took issue with the initial removals on Steam… tbh I wasn’t effected, as I don’t tend to play porn games, and if I was going to, I’d probably avoid some of the extreme themes those original removals had.

In my opinion, adults should be able to consensually interact with whatever media they so care to! Still, it’s in a platform’s rights to choose what they allow or deny… so I appreciate Steam being so open to mature content.

But payment processors should have no say in what is allowed on a platform. As long as it’s legal, they shouldn’t be policing transactions at all!

sanitising parts to be in accordance with console standards or censoring the game, depending on who you ask.

It’s censorship, I don’t really see how one could argue (well) that it’s not. Self-censorship is still censorship, and seeing as the rationale for this change was specific platform policies, I think it’s absolutely fair to view the change happening on PC critically.

Honestly, the story and gameplay is still very dark and gritty, so I don’t think these changes would’ve had much backlash had they been this way from the start. Sometimes explicit content isn’t strictly required to get a point across, and can make a game less accessible, so I can understand games having a warning with a toggle.

But I’m very against total censorship. This reminds me a lot of when Superhot VR removed multiple scenes 4 years after the game’s release, because they were related to self-harm or suicide. Note that the game had a warning on launch as well as a toggle for this content. The linked article does a great deep dive on it, but imo I think the change really does affect the game. I got done with it (post-censorship) and did not see the hype. The game wasn’t very long and didn’t have many “whoa” moments. But shooting yourself… that’s something that you can only really do in VR, assuming it’s not coded in to a flatscreen game. And it would’ve fit into the game’s plot and themes very well.

I think the concept of Game Pass works best for older or smaller games. Charging $60+ for a game makes people expect a certain level of quality and amount of content.

Putting games like that on it though? Especially day-one? Of course their sales are gonna take a hit!

Hi-fi Rush would be my example of a super polished game with a solid amount of content. It reviewed incredibly well; so much so that I bought the game on Steam because of the hype. But most people with game pass just played it there… and they ended up shutting down the studio.

I think for brand new releases, some kind of demo or limited access could work. Give players the Call of Duty campaign, give us the opening chapters of story-driven games, or give us a limited selection of levels for games formatted like that. Leave some incentive, though, for players to buy the game, especially if it’s a good game that players would be convinced to buy by playing a bit.

Oh, gotcha. That makes a lot more sense. And yeah, you’re probs right, though it is a bit hard to tell at that angle.

The woman on the right could totally be Gen Z imo.

I like the meme, but I do feel it misunderstood the format a bit. There’s no rules for memes, but I think a lot of the humor is derived from the typical structure of this meme.

From what I’ve seen, it’s usually the older woman saying something that makes sense to our generation, be it a cultural reference, a current event or some slang phrase.

Then the younger woman dismisses it as the older woman just losing her marbles, playing along and then saying “let’s get you to bed”.

Imo the humor is mainly derived from that disconnect— we, the viewer, understand what the older woman is saying perfectly fine, but also recognize that it is contextual, and a younger person may be confused by it.

This meme isn’t bad, but it does stray from that format. It comes across more as a respectful conversation between two people that understand and care about each other. I’d argue that the humor of this one is moreso about the (unfortunate) relatability of the dialog. It does use the ages of the characters well though, since the conversation is focused on generational differences.

also aw man I just deconstructed an internet meme huh?

Oh? So I take it you look at a lot of Gen Z women, huh? 😏

Nah I’m just playin. But being real, lots of Gen Z are adults now. The woman on the right could totally be Gen Z imo.

Sorry for the late reply. Also @Cricket’s response is great and actually references a source!

Anecdotally though, as a user, I’ve noticed that some things require extra permissions. Usually there’s a prompt from the operating system that’ll ask for permission capture the desktop, which lets me specify which window or monitor to share. It uses the “XDG Desktop Portal”, which was already what allowed Flatpaks to securely access OS resources, and it has a whole bunch of different requests for resources and permissions. It’s similar to a web browser, where it’ll prompt you for privileges when an app wants them.

The hardest pain point for me has been that an app cannot detect keyboard input if it isn’t focused. This could prevent key loggers, but it also makes global shortcuts not work. There is a protocol that allows an app to request a key be forwarded to it, but it’s not widely implemented in apps (discord, for example) and I’ve had to rely on workarounds.