Ah yes. Elections are fascist and true leftism is… Let me guess… A dictatorship of the proletariat?

EnLiGhTeNeD cEnTrIsM

The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?

You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.

They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.

Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.

I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.

There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.

So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.

Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.

BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.

I have had issues in the past with bad SD cards on my pi-hole that cause it to stop working after a few minutes. I know you said it works fine without Mullvad, but was that just a quick verification or an extended long-term test with traffic?

The article was updated in 2023 with the most recent data.

Almost all of the sales of videogames are front-loaded. Most at launch (or at the launch of a re-release), and then it falls off hard over a couple of years. Morrowind came out in 2002. It’s incredible that Bethesda even released any sales data still by 2010. The units sold since then would be immaterial to the conversation.

Morrowind only sold ~4 million units. I think you’re overestimating how big the fan base is. The fan base is loyal, opinionated, and vocal, but small.

So you’d rather be spies on by the formerly largest panopticon ever created AND not be able to side load?

If you think Apple is some paragon of privacy you might want to do some research on that lol.

They make some good points about how we view “classic” games too.

A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like “look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they’re almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!”.

Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I’ve tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.

On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being “revolutionary for their time” often don’t hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it’s possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.

When I look back at what I’ve played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don’t think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say “wow that’s a Control-like” game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that’s the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.

And it still outsold the 360 in the end

I don’t remember that. Maybe you’re thinking of something like “if the Wii keeps selling at its current pace it will pustell the PS2”?

They said that about the Switch as well and it didn’t happen.

Sure, I might own the hardware

Not for long. The goal seems to be to make RAM, flash memory, and GPU’s so expensive that most consumers will need to purchase low-powered client devices and subscribe to cloud computing business models. It’s a handful of companies who are cornering the markets, controlling the supply, and seeking rents.

As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.

In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).

So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn’t want to spend much time in my office when I wasn’t working anymore.

So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife’s machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.

There’s still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn’t there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn’t have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.

Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.

It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.

That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.

I played a decent number of games this year, and a lot of games that have huge fan bases. God of War 2018, Bloodborne (my first ever soulslike), Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and more. But the one that keeps gnawing at me is Subnautica

I remember when it was in early access I watched Markiplier play it, and it piqued my interest enough that it was the first time I ever bought anything in early access. Which is very unusual for me (I think the only other time I’ve done that was Hades, which was also great). I played through as much of the game as there was at the time, or at least as I could find. Which was still mostly in the safe shallows, no deep areas. Still out in a dozen hours or so and was satisfied given the price so I moved on.

In 2024 i recommended it to my wife, who loves marine biology and base building games. She, in turn loved the game and I watched her play through it. I got to see all of the deep areas. After watching her play it and the DLC I got the itch to go back to it, so I started a new file in late 2024.

By mid-January 2025 I was about halfway through that file. My wife visiting her friend in another city, so I had the house to myself, I think I took some PTO too. Single-digit temperatures Farenheit outside. My wife had taken our only car, so I was loaded up with plenty of weed, drinks, food, and snacks. So I had a few days to focus and finish that first file. I had such a great time I did something else I almost never do: I immediately started a new file to play it again. While I had so much fun, I also learned so much and had so many ideas of what I could have done better. Better places to build based, exploring in a different order, knowing all the great spots to farm resources and get blueprints and everything.

So I played through again. The soundtrack is phenomenal synthwave that perfectly suits the game, but by the time I had built my cyclops and was ready to plunge down into the depths I was also ready for a new soundtrack. I put on one of my favorite albums, which is also one of the most appropriate: Oceanic, by Isis.

I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Isis or Subnautica. Just absolutely sublime. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.

However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.

Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.

Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.

The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.

The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?