NGL, when I first saw Warner making a public fuss over this, I had a bit of a reaction. Like, no one comes after my boy steam, I like my games and I like my platform. And maybe it’s because I don’t engage in many public multiplayer games these days, but I just haven’t really come across this extremist content frequently enough to feel Congress needs to get involved.

But…

I can see from the comments, my anecdotal experiences aren’t the whole picture. And I do get that sometimes in an otherwise free market, regulation is necessary to prevent a situation where a company does the right thing and then suffers financially from the backlash/boycott that ensues. Better to let the government be the ones to take the heat by those that get upset by the moderation.

But I also kind of agree with the sentiment, Congress needs to clean up its own hate speech and ethics, before further legislating what everyone else should be doing.

It’s fair to continue to consider them in competition with other store fronts. Don’t be fooled into thinking it will always be a great way to get cheap games, though. That brand, is EXACTLY what IGN paid for when they bought them: for the faith they built up in people like yourself, that they are and will always continue to be a trusted company. And part of the amortization of that purchase, is converting that belief into money, by enshittifying it. By taking advantage that they can make less valuable offers, raise prices, and fail to keep up with competitors innovations, on the backs of people remembering the good experiences they had with the company based on its original ownership.

Correct - this was always going to be the case the moment IGN bought humble bundle. Any delay in getting to this point was a conscious decision about how fast to boil the frog - but IGN didn’t buy Humble Bundle because they believed in the mission of helping charities and indie game developers, they bought it because they believed they could make more money than they spent on it.

Maybe not in some countries. It’s certainly a way that term gets used in the US. See also, reduction in force (RIF), downsize, reorg, shifting priorities, etc. The way labor laws are written, companies are encouraged to do this, because it circumvents protections against firing someone on leave, pregnant, or in a minority. When an individual is let go, there’s risk of litigation or claims that it’s because of some protected status: and correct or not, we’re a very litigious country with a lot of lawyers looking for a payday. So more and more, companies have normalized layoffs even when they’re doing very well, because its a way to “clean out” the company of less productive employees with much less risk of getting sued: and they can always rehire or shift exceptional employees they want to keep.

Yep - we get it. But some of us don’t enjoy the effects that microtransactions have on the game experience, and would prefer not to play those kinds of games. A filter whereby we could just hide those games, and browse ones that we would enjoy, that are more targeted for us, would both save us time and increase the likelihood of us finding a game we want to buy, improving the shopping experience and putting more money into game developers’ and Steam’s pockets. Similar to how the google play store offers a “premium/paid apps” section, because while much of the market prefers free to play and doesn’t mind ads or microtransactions, they know some of us loath it and would rather pay up front for an experience that doesn’t go there, and they make more money when they help shoppers shop.

This has been a universal problem with any MMO game that tries to have some kind of a resource grind/time sink. Even if you can manage to stop players from botting it, you can’t stop players from third world countries selling their time to players in first world countries. The game economy quickly becomes a reflection of real world capitalism that most of its players were trying to escape.

It feels like there’s a lot of potential here. One of the most loved colony sims, Dwarf Fortress, thrives on this concept of emergent behavior: yes, the descriptions of the individual characters, their motivations and backstories does have a sort of hollow, procedural generation to them. But the stories they enable, the wacky quirks like an engraver going nuts putting up murals to cheese on everyone’s walls, the fact that when you get an unlikely hero or battle outcome it isn’t the author’s giving them destiny but a true random fluke, the unexpected disaster of opening an unseen water or lava flow or awakening some ancient evil - that can create a wonderful sandbox where players encounter and create their own stories.

There’s a balance in story telling, especially interactive story telling, between romanticism and realism. Between what we want to happen, and what actually happens. And sometimes, oftentimes, it’s the things we didn’t want to happen that make a story more compelling and memorable.

This last week - factorio, working on city blocks, it’s a little daunting, but hoping the blueprints will serve me in upcoming modded runs that need more scaling.

Vampire survivors, caught a sale, fun as hell if a bit of a patient gamers moment. If you just emerged from under a rock, it’s a minimalistic horde survival roguelite with lots of metaprogression through unlocks, reminds me of an oldie called Crimsonland.

Latest pickup was book of hours: a game made by the guys that did Cultist Simulator, with a similar cards mechanic but a little less stress with everything trying to kill you. Was a little confusing at first but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Little bit of Orb of Creation: the 0.6 patch is in beta and overhauls the whole game. Combat currently disabled but research, artifacts, and augments in general were made way more interesting. This is an incremental game (big numbers, very casual difficulty, goal tends to be to unlock more stuff and bigger numbers).

And an EA account. And agreement to a 3rd party EULA with EA. For a single player game. That’s some real “we’re gonna sell you microtransactions later” energy out of a 60 dollar release.

There’s anti-union busting laws that are supposed to disallow a company from blatantly targeting unionized employees. But they’re worthless if not used to take the company to court. Starbucks has been up to the same thing: when a store unionizes they mysteriously select it to close.

Ah, seconding ark. I wanted a couple weeks after my friends jumped aboard the hype train, which lasted only a short couple weeks. A few years later and it’s free on EGS, a friend of mine owns a steam copy, and we cannot for our lives manage to connect a private game server between the two platforms. Basically first and one of the very few games I’ve ever refunded on steam, and not even worth playing for free from EGS.

Anti-Idle the Game was an absolute house of a flash game. It may not look like much at first, but it unfolds into the most ambitious incremental game of its era.