There are so many games that I don’t even care about all the games available on Steam (that I’d be willing to play). We have so many games coming out that I’d have to play game for a living to play all the games I want to play, and even then I’m not 100% sure I’d be able to play everything I’d be open to play. I have multiple games that I’ve purchased and installed thinking “I’ll get to them soon enough” and they’re just taking drive space. I also have multiple games on my wishlist that are “waiting for a discount” but I’m probably never going to pick them up because actually they’re waiting for my backlog to clear and it will never clear.

Does it suck that Alan Wake is Epic exclusive. Sure. Does it really matter to me? Not really because I’m oversaturated with games I want to play. Missing one great game doesn’t matter when I already have a backlog of great games I won’t purchase because I have a backlog of great games I’ve purchased that I won’t play because I have a backlog of great games I really want to play.

You wanted to know why there aren’t all time lows on other stores. You agree that the lower the price gets the more people are likely to purchase it. But then you think userbase is irrelevant?

Let’s say there are 10 million gamers in the entire world, 90% use steam 10% use Epic. Not that it matters but I’ll add it anyway to further prove the point, Epic takes 10% and Steam takes 30%. You make a game that 50% of all the gamers in the world want to buy at a certain price. Let’s say you have no issues selling on Epic and you sell at full price ($60) to the 50% of Epic customers. You make $60 * 0.9 * 1 mil * 0.5 = $27 million. On Steam your game doesn’t sell at all on full price but at 50% off all potential customers will buy the game. So with a 50% discount on Steam you will make $60 * 0.5 * 0.7 * 9 mil * 0.5 = $94.5 million.

You can literally have Steam take a bigger cut than Epic and sell the game for half a price and still make more money on Steam because the userbase plays a huge role in how much money you’ll actually make. That is why you see all time lows on Steam, because you can sell your game for cheaper than any other store and still make more money on Steam.

How much RAM do you imagine internet cafe machines use? 8gb? 16gb? 32gb?

You can check yourself. I’m pretty sure the “cafe cards” amount to around 3-8% of the lowest end cards depending on whether we consider 1650 and 1060 as cafe cards. Obviously also excluding integrated cards because those I didn’t consider in the first place. On the other hand the current gen and last gen low end cards (xx50 and xx60) make up 25-28% of the market.

Also I don’t understand why you’d want to exclude cafe’s from the potential market? It’s not like internet cafes don’t upgrade their hardware. When they do upgrade they’re definitely going with the low end cards.

If the userbase is irrelevant then X per game is also irrelevant. X per game matters only in the context of how many sales you’ll make. There’s a strong correlation between sales and userbase because more users means more potential sales.

And which platform has the most potential buyers, by a long shot? Steam. That’s why you’re usually seeing all time lows on the Steam platform, because the sheer amount of buyers outweighs the per sale loss.

Honestly, I hope AMD-s shift to focus on lower end cards is successful. It should be considering the xx60 series (and performance equivalent) cards make up like 50% of the entire consumer GPU hardware? At least I think it was around 50 the last time I tried to sum up all the percentages of the Steam hardware survey. There’s definitely a huge market they can tap if they can bang-per-buck outprice Nvidia (and I guess also Intel). Maybe even bring down the ridiculous pricing of modern GPU-s.

And? If they sell at the same price as Steam but with the store taking a smaller cut they’ll make more money per sale.

Why should we see that?

I think that’s really the issue with Ubisoft, they just don’t make “must play” games anymore. Seriously, what’s the last universally liked Ubisoft game that everyone wanted to play? Far Cry 3. Close second is probably AC: Black flag but that was already suffering from AC fatigue and its critical acclaim has come retroactively. Those games are over a decade old. Ubisoft hasn’t released anything in the last decade where the mainstream gaming goes “We must play that”. Ubisoft simply doesn’t make exciting games anymore. They make games that are for everyone which also means they’re for no-one.

Selling literal shit at a restaurant also isn’t unfeasible if the customer doesn’t care about eating shit. But nobody is going to eat shit and nobody (normal) is going to pay $10+ a month to get mostly gimmick features. At a glance there’s barely anything useful in the API.

The older stalker games are worth it only if you want the story. If you want to experience the gameplay you can download stalker Anomaly for free. Anomaly is a standalone mod that combines the 3 stalker games into one (minus the story) and adds cut content and has been “modernized” over time. It’s a much better experience than the original games and the community considers it THE way to play Stalker, and ontop of being a mod it also has a healthy modding community.

I don’t remember how beginner friendly it might be (probably not very because the mod gives you a lot of customization options before you even start the game) but I’m sure there are some beginner guides on YouTube. And for the price of free the only question is how much time you’re willing to invest to play Stalker. And if you think the OG games will be much easier, not really. No matter what stalker game you start with you’re bound to meet the relatively steep learning curve.

okay, that makes sense. The online/offline terminology was just confusing.

Online spawner?

I think it might have more to do with the fact that our perception of morality changes with societal norms. People in the 19th century probably looked at Roman gay sex as something bad and vulgar because gays were bad. Now we view Roman gay sex in a positive light.

Were the 19th century people bad people because they viewed homosexuality as something bad? Or do we consider them bad just because we no longer see homosexuality as something bad? What if 200 years from now homosexuality is considered bad again, do the 19th century people become good?

Maybe we shouldn’t apply our current moral values to people who lived at a different time with different moral values?

Ugh, you had to mention the fast timescale… Now I’m seeing it too and it’s so annoying.

I guess I’ve gotten lucky. I have stable FPS, performance doesn’t tank in the first village, no crashes and the only stuttering I had was when I was killing everyone at the military base and I had about 20 bodies at the building entrance because they just kept coming.

Looking at the reviews and what others are saying I think I’m very much the exception here. I can attest that if the game works it very much is the STALKER experience and if STALKER is your jam then the game is worth playing.

My only negatives so far are the key binds (I checked, I can’t set them how I want to because some actions can’t be changed from the settings menu), there’s no overview of your standing with a faction or who belongs to what faction (maybe it unlocks later as I’m still in the first area, but I do miss that feature) and some mutants seem too beefy (would’ve never imagined running away from a pack of flesh, but I do run away because they eat buckshot for breakfast).

My first hour of gameplay didn’t feel like as bad as the reviewers put it. I have a relatively beefy machine (5800x, 4070 and 32gb of ram), the game defaulted me to epic settings (with DLSS and frame gen) and I’m getting a pretty stable 50 FPS. The only bug I’ve encountered is the audio not playing, and I guess also the sun not reflecting correctly off of windows.

The first hour isn’t much but I was expecting a much worse initial experience. My biggest issue so far has been the default keybinds but I’m hoping to solve it when I have more time to tinker in the settings menus. I’ll update my experience when I’ve had more time to play. So far I’m happy.

If anyone is wondering it’s actually because of frame of reference. The first two images have speeds in relation to the rotation of earth, the last imagine uses a different frame of reference. If you put the last image in the same frame of reference as the first two images the number there would be 0km/h, because it would be moving in relation to itself.

I disagree. I stopped watching when Spike was scoped in on Vicious and didn’t kill him. Anime Spike would’ve never let Vicious go because this is how Spike reacted when someone mistook him for Vicious. You don’t get that pissed off unless you really hate someone with every fiber of your being. I had other issues with the live action as well but I’ve clearly wiped my memory of its existence. Only the Spike thing remains because it’s the reason I stopped watching.