I’m not a lawyer: Many companies are updating their terms requiring that disputes are settled through arbitration, usually where a 3rd party selected by the company rules on the disagreement.

It’s meant to protect them from excessive lawsuit payments that can happen when you go to court.

Valve went the other way, and is saying that all legal disputes should go to court instead.

Came across a truck in a southern town covered in stickers of anime traps (some were borderline hentai), gay pride stickers, and a whole lot of gun stickers. They had a bumper sticker that said something like “the only thing straight about me is my shooting”.

From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.

8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.

The Yakuza games alternate wildly between being extremely serious dramas about underworld crime, and extremely light hearted and wacky side quests. Some people might find the change in tone breaks immersion, but I find the two extremes increase the impact of each other. When a game is serious all the time I get numb to it, there needs to be a variety of lighthearted content for me to really feel the impact of when things get heavy.

I think Overwatch 1 at it’s peak could be compared to CS2.

Right, that’s why the collective play amount is ~140k when the steam daily is only ~30k

That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.

According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.

For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.

So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.

AI is starting to get really smart

With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.

I’ve heard that brought up, but I’ve never seen actual proof of it. It clearly doesn’t apply to sale prices though, because other stores basically always have lower sale prices than steam itself.

That’s the part of France that I want to visit.

Steam also has a lot of other stores selling their games though. Unless epic is giving it away for free, I’m probably going to get a better deal through a fanatical bundle or someone else than I would on epic.

I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn’t caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don’t have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.

Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they’ve done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn’t favorable to buyers. They’ve created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.

Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.

You can kinda already do that, apps like rdx, Stealth, and Geddit pull reddit content without using the API. You can’t vote/comment, but you can still follow communities that have worthwhile content.

Some other stuff you might try is making sure you’re using proton experimental, and try the launch options: PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 %command% -dx11

Yeah, he can use something like nvtop. Should make it really easy to see if it’s being used.

Well that’s kinda terrifying. Being “locked in” is one of the scarier things I can imagine, and it sounds like it might be a lot more common than we thought.

This seems cool, but hasn’t Windows 11 started blocking some different apps that replace parts of the UI?

The catch with Libby is that usually all the good books have hold times. This isn’t an issue when you’ve been using Libby for awhile, you put a bunch of books on hold and you reach a point where you always have something available. But it can take weeks/months as a new user to get to that point where you are constantly having waitlisted books coming available.