Does Factorio count? It’s a good game, you can play multiplayer, the factory can always grow (at least until your hardware, or in the extreme the software, can no longer handle it) and if you’re grinding for something rather than automating it, you’re doing it wrong.

Interesting that the post in my feed after this one indicated the Monopoly Go was the most profitable game of 2024. Mobile gaming is just multiple sets of almost entirely separate cultures from each other and other gaming spaces.

If we’re copying Witcher 3 levels of content anywhere, can we leave behind like 95% of the ocean based points of interest? That was the absolute lowest point of the game for me by a mile.

Marvel Snap serves up poorly hidden bot matches and penalizes you for leaving as well. For example, they “reset” the ranked ladder every month, but retain their hidden mmr, and people with a really high mmr are MORE likely to face bots, because the system is designed to align your rank with their MMR, but if you leave the match, you forfeit what is essentially an ante used to determine your rank. But everyone gets some bots, and the amount varies based on several things, basically all of them manipulative to the player and their rank system.

It feels like assuming a lot of positive intent to guess that the match against bots is so that people can learn rather than trying to feed them a dopamine hit so they don’t get discouraged and fuck off, but maybe I’m a cynic.

Ah, the bad faith internet classic, someone who disagrees with you must not be a real person who holds an authentic viewpoint. Clearly only the things that feel right to you can only ever be things that feel right to others. You obviously should keep ignoring the voting on all the posts in this chain and other supportive comments, certainly don’t get introspective.

Thanks for showing me there’s no point in having further discussions with you.

Have a nice life.

I’d recommend you look up a recipe by Babish, Alton Brown or Kenji Lopez-Alt, they all usually pretty solid.

That’s the neat part about it not being the only way to access a game, people can choose, if they want to buy other things, they can buy other things, but if they still like certain titles available from MS, they can still get those even outside the service. Or they can just get the subscription if it costs them less for stuff they’d support anyway. If they don’t want to support MS for decisions they’ve made with studios, they can choose to not buy anything too, but I’m not sure how that’s going to help other studios they care about within MS. And let’s not pretend the studio issue is exclusively a problem with MS or game pass, it’s a capitalism symptom across the industry.

As for third party contracts for making things available on game pass, those developers get to choose if the deal is good enough for them or not, they have a stake and more information than outsiders trying to play armchair executives.

Nobody’s calling it a default here, the options aren’t “have only game pass forever” and “game pass doesn’t exist”, there’s plenty of room for nuance in-between. So long as game pass continues to be a value proposition for enough consumers, it’ll be around, if they raise the price too much or lower the quality or offerings so that it isn’t seen as a good deal, people will stop paying. Adding it to the deck would increase the value proposition.

I find it odd that an argument about giving people the power of choice is used to advocate against a choice existing.

If ever game pass is the only legal option for accessing a game, I’ll happily consider revising my opinion, until then increased choices is always more consumer friendly. People should make their own personal choices about which of those options work best for themselves, and just because one option is preferred by some people, doesn’t mean another can’t be preferable to others.

Game Pass native on Steam Deck would be 🔥🔥🔥

I’ve been using the Zelotes C-10 (wired for my desktop) and F-17 (wireless for work laptop), when they say vertical, they mean it. Anecdotally, it has helped with my wrist pains. I also wanted the extra buttons on the C-10, so I could map them for gaming (I also use a Razer Tartarus for my left hand for gaming).

I used a Nexus (nxstek.com) for years and it still worked great, only replaced it when I switched to a vertical mouse for wrist ergo, now my wife still uses, and it’s the mouse that’s lasted her the longest (she’s hard as fuck on mice for some reason). I’d suggest you check out the SM-8000B from them.

For public ones, depending on what people started getting, it’d really strain the AIs. You could go in like 1 or two ways, probably different people getting both.

Something very uniform but still unique, like a QR code kind of deal, AIs would hallucinate the crap out of that. Or abstractions, like people do to change the way the shape of their face to combat facial recognition.

For private ones, just don’t ever get it photographed, any image showing that area without it would be probably fake.

I am waiting for people to start getting both public and hidden authentication tattoos, so they can prove generative images aren’t actually them.

It’s listed under each title in the article.

For something I’m paying for, I want no ads, recommended or otherwise.

For something I get for free, if it’s easily skippable/ignorable, I don’t really care, I’ll skip it or mute the tab or whatever. If I can’t, I’d rather have a like sniper level targeted ad (use all the data!), really try to show me something I’ll care about (there was some like 10 minutes ad about the science behing glass by one of the guys from MythBusters, I watched the whole ad, it was great). The demographic level targeted ads are my 2nd least favorite, mostly because it feels like I usually need to suffer through what is a targeted ad but if they bothered to exclude some of the audience based on some data points (looking at you luxury car ads, it’s just never going to happen), they’d know I’m a bad target, I’d rather some generic add over those. My least favorite ad though, when I get an ad in a language I don’t even understand, like at least match my primary language, wasting everyone’s time…

Article feels weirdly biased, an Xbox mid-gen update has been talked about for over a year and is expected in the next like 4-6 months. Anyone in the market for a current gen Xbox is likely to consider that and may decide to postpone their purchase until then, making sales artificially lower than demand for an Xbox. The article doesn’t even mention it, instead talking about even more speculative hardware that isn’t likely more than some R&D project, if that.

You can see similar effects for PS4 sales when the PS5 was announced, sales cratered. Can’t tell too much with the PS4 to PS4 pro because they announced close to actual release.

Feels like the author is clickbaiting the console war.

It’s more about the hardware/firmware/software uniformity and reliability for some people. My friend is in this camp, he doesn’t want to need to manage a PC, he just wants a box he can reliably turn on and use.

This isn’t early access, it’s advanced access, like if a game has a deluxe edition that lets people play a few days before the official release.

While that’s part of it, it’s definitely not “just” that.

Sadly, part of it is that the game has released in a fairly stable/polished state, which is considered a positive in the world of broken releases. The multiplayer also just works with little issue as opposed to some problems of yesteryear.

There’s also a perhaps surprising pent up demand for good co-op PvE focused games. They blow-up hard but tend to fade out depending on gameplay quality. Part of this is the streamer effect, streamers like to play group games with other streamers because it helps cross-pollinate their audiences. Sales are also improved due to group/peer-pressure, if someone can pull in their friend group, that’s a lot of sale multiplication.

I also think that the developers tried to make a game that’s fun. A lot of decisions seem to have followed the rule of cool for this type of game e.g. pal mounts, firearms, catching people, automation of survival elements via slavery.

It also manages to have both a clear and guided progression system while maintaining the freedom for the player to just fuck off and do whatever they want while still at least partially progressing.

My only honest gripes with the game are how world saves are handled (they should use the Grounded system in addition to having dedicated servers) and that I for some reason can’t find the exit button on the title screen so to quit I need to alt-f4, for the rare times I need it.

Not that I’ve seen at least, you can mulch a bunch of the same type to get like a better tier of it, but for like the little penguins and the big penguins, you get the big ones from eggs or as a boss so far.