I’ll play the game in like 4-5 years like how I played the first one years later for way cheaper. So cheap I couldn’t be disappointed with the writing and just enjoyed the solid but unremarkable game

I guess this bodes well for Proton becoming increasingly a Google One products replacement with more users potentially paying

I don’t get EA/Bioware. Fantasy is consistently more popular than scifi. Inquisition was their best selling game. Yet DA was never treated like a heavyweight like Mass Effect. My expectations tanked when David Gaider left

I would guess Telegram if the users hit the toggle wherever it’s not default. After what you’ve listed and Telegram, I’d guess Matrix/Element

Play that years down the line. The first one was OK but I paid like $15 for it with the expansion. Obsidian hasn’t had a clear jump in quality since the MS purchase. Possibly even signs of writing regression with Avowed so can’t imagine much hype for this game

Still on the Xbox One and PS4. Incredible longevity. Expect the same for the PS5 when the PS6 comes out

They released EGS Android game store without a library view, still none. They’re really bad at making a good first impression. PC it’s been 7 years. 7 years of bad impressions

I don’t think Americans and Europeans know how much invasions into southeast Asia in the 1800s and prior there were. It’s not a post-WW2 thing. It’s centuries of atrocities in the region. Someday the UK are going to be grandstanding against India too and people out here will be confused why Indians aren’t wistfully looking back to the days of the British empire exporting foods by coercion while Indians go through famines

Is the plan to kill some more millions of southeast Asians like good ol’ days

Americans shouldn’t be looking at other countries to feel better about themselves regardless. They should be letting themselves feel bad so that they actually maintain some energy levels to fight for their own rights domestically instead of contributing to the constant stream of jingoism that has been American media since inception. Decades living and its a cycle of next enemy while economic disparity just keeps widening but people are pacifying themselves with the next enemy

Every laptop I’ve bought has come with Windows including gaming ones. Up to really powerful computers. Like having a 4080 in it or down to just integrated. I could be doing nothing and you’ll hear the fan spin up hard on Windows.

On hardware with just integrated graphics, Windows just sucks compared to Linux. Fan spins up but you’ll still get animation hitches as Windows background services are doing something. Switch to Linux and resource usage just matches up really well with what you know you’ve installed and set to run. Just whatever is popular: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Pop_OS, etc compared to consumer Windows editions.

Plus it’s nice installing an OS and not having to go through pages of telemetry opt-outs, encouragement to buy O365, OneDrive, Copilot+, Gamepass, create online MS account, etc. Windows went from a relatively neutral marketplace, besides the bundled software, to a platform for marketing MS and other companies subscription services

Neutral base of fairly standardized open source Linux operating systems is going to show itself overtime as preferable as these controlled platforms get monetized harder. Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android are all in varying stages of being subscription and marketing data farms

Definitely. I got Oblivion in April of 2006 about a month after the game came out. Xbox 360 had just come out months prior in November 2005. Morrowind was not a mainstream hit. Oblivion also not being a mainstream game yet. Mainstream for the series was Skyrim with the arrow in the knee and fus roh dah viral stuff

Steam started supported 3rd party games in I believe 2005. Peak concurrent users on Steam was probably in the low hundreds of thousands compared to today’s ~40 million. PS3 would launch end of 2006 and Oblivion wouldn’t show up on it until some time after launch

I don’t know if it’s the same law but they’ve already said they’d move countries, anywhere with laws suitable for the service

The controls I thought were really easy but I played on PC so I could swing the mouse around and I don’t need to looks at the keyboard to hit almost any key. So for me I thought it was real easy to control contrary to what I read online

Then I played on a console and then I understood the hate for Witcher 3 controls. I remember it feeling very heavy. Weird to control the camera and Geralt

I’ve never viewed the anti-slavery stance as much of any substance. The French and others just exported slavery to other countries so they wouldn’t feel bad witnessing where their wealth was coming from. I side eye everytime I see news of French paratroopers touching down in whatever African country that is supposed to be fully independent and not under any French coercion

My impression is that France mostly ignores with popular support anything they had done for centuries to people in other countries. That seems true for most of the European colonial empire countries treating their roles in atrocities as footnotes in history rather than major events that modern countries are still trying to rebuild from

I’m pretty sure Steam has been able to do that since launch, though I do remember the legendary loading bar that would progress then regress then progress and regress all with the same text message there so it wasn’t perfect in 2003. Roller coaster early on but by like 2007 it was pretty solid

I’m pretty sure EA Origin was able to do that day one or within a year of release. Origin was OK from what I remember just that it took stayed stagnant and I’m guessing onboarding games to the platform being a terrible process considering how sparse releases were on there

Steam is a mature platform. It doesn’t roll out new user facing features often. Yet somehow I think the gap has widened since 2018 vs EGS

It’s been I think about 7 years and it’s not feature competitive for end users with 2011 Steam even though they definitely make more money than 2004-2011 Valve and by 2018 had 14 years of history to look at and feature target based off what competition offered

The CEO was regularly on Twitter complaining about Windows but refused to help grow Linux adoption. Valve has been doing that since like 2012. He constantly talks about standing with small developers but then in the Apple court case admits they would have been quiet if Apple gave them a special revenue split deal. He complains about Steam and mobile store cuts but doesn’t complain about consoles having the same.

Exclusive deals in lieu of providing a better experience for the end user. Talked up so much about being superior because they’re developer focused; didn’t have self publishing tools until the end of 2023 - 5 years after EGS launched. It’s been 7 years. They haven’t made PC gaming any better. They made it worse for a time when they were throwing cash at exclusives rather than store platform feature development

Recent example of how bad they are with pushing minimal viable products. EGS mobile store was launched the beginning of this year with no library view. You just scroll up and down, side to side looking for games you own mixed among games you don’t own. Their concept of minimal viable product is insanely mediocre for how vocal the CEO is and how much money they make and their turnaround time on improving these stores is awful.

There are numerous Android storefronts that don’t have Unreal Engine and Fortnite money keeping the companies funded and somehow Epic comes out the gate mediocre again where its marketing is free games but it’s mobile games so what’s available is way less headline worthy. They learned nothing from 2018 about the difference between what they consider a minimal viable product and what the market would consider a market competitive minimal viable product

Years ago Epic put out a kanban board to display a public feature development tracker to assure people they were working on improving the store. They abandoned that quick and I’m pretty sure what few they had on that, most still haven’t been implemented

Their support for handheld is at the level of GOG which barely markets itself and is pretty low revenue as it rarely gets any games that aren’t years old. Whether Windows or Linux, Epic for all their billions haven’t created a gamepad/TV centric interface. EGS is about at the level of GOG Galaxy which because of its DRM free policy will probably never be a big money maker. That’s just insane to me how badly managed EGS is to have so much more money backing it and so little to show for it in the product

The CEO is a regular blowhard virtue signalling about liberty/freedom on Twitter but can’t be bothered to try and pioneer anything for users as a storefront. Since 2018 EGS has been so stagnant while Valve has been expanding Steam as a platform, that EGS is less relevant to me today than when they were throwing out major free games every month. I have no faith in the platform to integrate WINE/Proton, put together a TV/gamepad interface, do something like Steam curators, comparable user review system, crowd sourced game tags - a lot of useless stuff makes it in those but I find them regularly useful at a glance as it’s usually pretty obvious which are probably jokes and which are probably legit, user gamepad mapping repository, I’ve used the guides before. Steam forums are not a place to browse, they’re a place to find when you Google a question and the answer is in a Steam forum thread Google/other shows you

I’d be happy with a suitable competitor. It’s just EGS has been terrible at it. I was sad that GameStop did nothing with Impulse. I had higher expectations for EA Origin. Ubisoft/UPlay was always garbage from day one AC2 always online DRM nonsense. I was hyped on GFWL before I learned they were charging for online multiplayer until that failed, also the install limits GFWL had where you had to call support when you reinstalled the game too many times. I was even excited for Windows 8 store until it was eating up peoples storage only reclaimable with a reformat of the drive

Only GOG exists with a unique selling point, DRM free. Every other competitor has existed just to try and have exclusives to make more money rather than try to attract users with a good service. In the end it turns out there’s so many solid to great games released every year that exclusives aren’t such a great point anymore. There’s not enough of them and exclusives not varied enough to make a storefront platform better than the total Steam package

My favorite thing about these is that even though minipc’s with them are around $2000 now, someday they’ll be cheap and the Switch 2 is coming out and will probably be a ~10 year platform. Someday it’ll be a solid choice as a cheap entry into PC gaming

I never get the mind blowness some people get about a hypothetical future Xbox branded handheld that could runs all these stores that can play PlayStation games. It’s a PC. You can play PlayStation games on Windows devices for years now. It’s not a gotcha big brain strategic masterpiece on Microsofts part. Pay Valve to play PlayStation games. Current Xbox gamers in the future pay Valve to play 3rd party games rather than Microsoft