shinratdr

Why shouldn’t he be downvoted? A downvote isn’t rude, and it’s not an indicator of how sane the opinion is. It indicates that the comment misses the point. They assume it’s about DRM, or that Epic didn’t to enough to deserve exclusivity, or that it’s not a true exclusive because you can pay the developer directly.

It’s not. It’s just about not wanting another launcher that doesn’t bring anything to the table. GOG is for old games, Itch is for small indies, and Steam is for everything else.

Epic is just Steam but worse, doesn’t work well on Steam Deck, with some exclusives that will hit Steam in a year. Doesn’t offer anything new or improved, just makes things worse by splitting a market by paying off developers, and because it doesn’t offer anything compelling, will probably die of when Epic eventually wastes all its Fortnite money and falls on hard times.

I wouldn’t give them a penny, they’re actively working to make PC gaming a worse experience when Steam arguably brought it back from the brink of death. Before Steam, PCs were about to become MMO and RTS machines. It’s hard to overstate how big their impact was.

Not if you own a Steam Deck, or want cloud saving, or have hundreds of games and don’t want to hope you remember your login and password for this one game 10 years from now and that the website still exists, or worry about keeping a local backup of the game if you want to play it in the future.

DRM-free direct downloads are a great option, but better than Steam? That’s subjective. For me, I want all of those things I listed so a non-Steam PC game for me is a last resort, pretty much only reserved for games that I really want to play.

I don’t know why people find this so difficult to understand, I have to assume they’re being wilfully obtuse. Would you download a separate app and create an account for every song you wanted to listen to or every movie you wanted to watch? Of course not. So why would games be any different?

I can only assume they see it as a double edged sword. Rights-holders (read: publishers, labels & studios) would have the power to sue here, not creators (read: artists, musicians and filmmakers).

These rights-holders also want to use AI so they don’t have to pay or deal with creators, so while they don’t love that other companies are making money off their content, they’re more just mad that someone else did it first before they could exploit their own content in the same way.

Sue and set precedent, and they might accidentally make it impossible for them to turn around and do the exact same thing once they have the technical know-how.

Entirely speculation, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

EDIT - As another commenter mentioned, I broke my own rule and commented without reading and this was discovery as part of an ongoing lawsuit. I did say it was entirely speculation though, and I still think this is why you don’t see so many AI related lawsuits in all the areas there is just tons of content generation. I also still think this is a “mad they couldn’t get there first” situation.

How thin does your skin need to be to discontinue your app because one person mentions it has a markdown formatting issue?

I don’t think you can put that on OP, unless there is context I’m missing.

lol it gets shorter every time this story is told. It was 18 months, and it started with a fully complete game engine with tons of finished assets.

For a similar comparison, GTA Vice City was released in October 2002 and GTA San Andreas was released in October 2004 with a 2 year dev cycle. Starting with a complete engine and doing what amounts to a total conversion does significantly shorten dev time.

Also, it’s not like they moved mountains to achieve this. FNV shipped with countless game breaking bugs and would CTD every 10 minutes on my system at launch. It only became playable after the first few patches. GTA SA shipped on disc, with the version that most people played being the initial PS2 version, and that version works quite well. So basically they achieved the 6 month reduction by lopping off the QA cycle.

Was it a short dev cycle even with that all being said? Yes, especially for an HD era game on an engine the team wasn’t as familiar with as the GTA SA team would have been. But let’s not rewrite history.

I love product recalls because it’s a great way to find out which store brand products are literally the same thing with a different label.

Great Value Soy Milk is Silk, found that out from the last one.

Sonos. Recent app troubles aside (it’s really not that bad, just kind of clunky for certain tasks), the longevity alone make them so worth it. Despite being essentially computers/smart home devices, they support 10+ year old devices in their latest app, older devices in their S1 Controller app, and the sound quality & setup ease is amazing.

Plus, they have pretty good Black Friday sales and make it easy to build piece by piece if pricing is too high. You can also used replaced pieces to build a sound system in another room.

Over ~3 years I started with a Beam, then bought a Sub and two Play:1s as rears. Bought an Arc, moved the Beam to the bedroom. Just recently I bought 2 Arc 300s as rears/upward firing Atmos speakers, and moved the Play:1s to the bedroom. Resale value stays high so if you have no use for a piece, you can sell it and get 50%-75% of what you paid out of it easily.

There are cheaper devices with better sound quality out there, but nobody else can compete on the whole package with Sonos.

No, they live mostly off the crumbs of peanut butter on toast.

How else do you get the sweet sweet olives from within?

In your initial comment, you said “having people vote for a random name could be disastrous”. That is pure speculation, based on nothing. Other countries do it and have for a very long time, it is absolutely not “disastrous”. Flawed? Possibly, all systems are. But perfectly functional and as good or better than optional voting.

Thinking that Americans for whatever reason are unable to do this when other culturally similar countries can manage just fine and have without anything “disastrous” occurring can only be interpreted in one of two ways:

1. You aren’t aware that this already occurs in other countries and thus are just speculating randomly with no information.

2. You think Americans are special in one way or another, and evidence from other countries where this is successfully used isn’t applicable because “reasons”.

I assumed it was option 1. From your follow up comment, it’s clear that it is actually option 2. I apologize for assuming you were uninformed, but option 2 is arguably much worse. It’s still American exceptionalism, just not a positive version.

Personally, I think you could handle it and it would be an improvement. Despite you branding me as anti-American, I apparently have more faith in your countries competence than you do.

It will never happen for a myriad of reasons, but they have nothing to do with the efficacy of compulsory voting, and everything to do with those in power knowing how to effectively manipulate the current system.

I didn’t assume anything, your point was “well if we tried that, what if this thing happened” like there is no way to tell. There IS a way to tell, look at the other countries that have already done this.

It’s irrelevant whether or not you are for or against the examples I used. I just find it uniquely American to act like if it isn’t currently what Americans do, then nobody must have ever tried it and to speak of the idea as if it is purely theoretical.

If you’re against it and care, then next time instead of fear mongering in the theoretical, you can educate yourself and offer an informed opinion instead, using real data from the many countries where this is already a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

Why do Americans always act like other countries don’t exist?

Whenever these kinds of things get brought up Americans act like these are radical new ideas that have never been tried before so obviously we must carefully consider the potential issues in the purely theoretical.

You aren’t that special. Universal health care works. Gun control works. Mandatory voting works. All of these things have been tried in other countries and have been policy for decades or centuries in those countries.

You don’t have to speculate on what might happen based on zero information. You can use the oodles of real world data at your fingertips where these are tried and tested solutions to problems.