Otome-chan

ah, then yeah you're right. it's possible in theory, but in practice not really. and it's not even desirable for most.

I don't actually ever remember hitting a DM length limit on reddit. I do know that reddit had thread/comment length limits which I hit all the damn time haha. But I don't recall ever hitting it in dms.

As for the > convention... sure. I don't doubt that maybe some older email clients worked like that. but modern day you can't really write in markdown style. and I can't seem to figure out how to get gmail doing block quotes lol.

but yeah I'm not really an email person. I prefer reddit-style markdown forums for asynchronous discussions, and live instant message like discord for live chats. email does neither of those, but it's just used because it's ubiquitous unfortunately. email is.... actually really bad. every thing requires it to signup, and then just spams your inbox. no one actually uses it to discuss/chat (and it's honestly terrible for that). so it ends up just being the way you verify your account after signup which is a dumb system. for password recovery I guess it works. it's also nice to get purchase confirmations in email. but other than that it's ehh.

tbh web as a whole really needs a rethink.

One person I'm speaking with I just gave them my discord info lol. email is, no offense, kinda terrible. there's no markdown support at all which makes the usual conversation style kinda difficult (block quoting a part of the message, and replying to it).

I also check email far less frequently than I check kbin lol.

I don't... get the appeal? Other than managing pirated games, what's the use of this?

steam is a storefront, not a game manager.

you absolutely can stream games. It's doable, it's just hard. nvidia's geforce now does game streaming over the internet. On a LAN it could really work well IMO. Steam link also did this on lan.

not super desirable for most users, but there's an appeal there and it is indeed doable.

drm free isn't really something you can guarantee unless you're fine with some games simply not being available on your platform. Some devs insist on it, and if you require drm free, they won't sell on your platform.

Personally, I prefer drm free, but if a platform only has it, and the game I want thus isn't there, I won't use it.

cloud saves is nice, but with decentralized solution that gets harder to do. who is "the cloud"?

I'm not really sure how a decentralized storefront would work? Where would the game files be hosted? Do you mean like a federated solution, that shares the encrypted game files around per instance? Or true decentralization where there's p2p hosting, with the devs having to run their own hosting originally before players pick up the game? The former I could see working, the latter not so much (smaller devs often don't have a 24/7 server to run for this sort of thing).

In terms of gui/client, I wouldn't mind one that let's me manage my games and isn't "locked down" to a particular company. For instance I have both steam and epic games launchers, why can't I just have one launcher that works with both storefronts?

In terms of features I want for a library/store client? Options to easily access the game's install folder. Mod manager if applicable. I'd like an auto-update feature. It'd be nice to have crypto payment options (not as required, but optionally if devs/customers wish to use). I'd like it to be able to track games outside of the storefront. For instance, so I can log what switch games I own (even if unplayable on pc). Easily able to rate games, manage my reviews for them, categorize and curate game lists. Howlongtobeat support would be cool (or it's own game time tracker). I love seeing how long it takes to beat games, and don't mind contributing my times (and logging it for myself). Tracking play history (what days/hours, how long, which games).

Steam has a lot of good features. Having a customizable profile page. I wanna be able to quickly share with people my gaming tastes/preferences, have a little customizable profile thing. Find others into similar kinds of games. Groups are cool, but idk why I never feel like it's worth it to contribute to steam groups (either feeling unwelcoming, or they're dead lol).

Stream/viewshare options. Along with making it easy to jump into multiplayer with someone (either joining existing play session, or starting one together).

Tagging/categorizing/recommending games is very important, especially for a storefront. Steam's system is dogshit for finding games I wanna play; mostly because the user tags end up mistagging a game entirely. hentai games show up for the "otome" tag, games like hello kitty get tagged as "horror", etc. making them basically undiscoverable.

Stuff I don't care about would be things like those steam items/unlockables, achievements, trophies, etc. So many game platforms do this and I just don't care. I wanna play the game, with friends if multiplayer, and I wanna find new games and share what I'm into. don't nag me about some item shit I don't care about lol.

One thing that'd be cool is having an out-of-game item marketplace for player economy. For instance we see sites like https://nookazon.com/ pop up as a dedicated website. why not have that as a built in feature to the client?

I don't care for "curators" other than on a user level. I run a steam curator page myself, but I think this sort of thing should be per person/account. Let me recommend a game or put a little thought about it that I can share with friends or others with similar interests.

I don't care for steam's "game community" thing. They try really hard to have a sort of mini-social-network for each game where you can post comments or screenshots or whatever. In the end, no one uses it seriously and it's just spam.

Basically: I just wanna be able to manage the games I own, track the games I have outside the platform, track my playtime, show my game preferences, easily connect with friends, and watch others or jump into game together. Steam does this pretty well in most aspects. They have a lot of fluff but that's ignorable.

epic games, in comparison, is just bad. the ui is laggy and slow, it's ugly, there's no way to curate what I like or categorize things, there's no way to share my tastes/preferences with others, there's no way to discover interesting new games. no way to manage mods.

ultimately though: there needs to be games, or a way to track or launch games that aren't sold on the platform. steam lets you add non-steam games to launch, but it's awful, annoying, and sucks.

also fix tags/recommendation/discoverability. I like niche stuff that people unfortunately feel the need to troll on, so discoverability ends up being difficult.

Might be empire earth? I recall playing a game like this as a kid as well, I think empire earth is the one I'm personally remembering.

edit: just realized you didn't specify rts lol. do you know the genre?

tfw kbin communities aren't listed. rip.

yup. though this sorta thing does border on "when, if ever, is it okay to intervene?" for example, if someone was joining a suicide cult is it okay to impose? but I think in this case even if you see it as just a superstition, lighting some candles and saying some stuff to yourself isn't actually hurting anyone.

Yup. so while mastodon users do see it like that, we don't see it like that here on kbin. you can follow people here and see their microblog posts on any magazine in your microblogs feed, but kbin forces kbin users to pick a magazine (even if it's the uncategorized /m/random) when posting a microblog post; whereas this isn't a requirement for mastodon users.