The art and music are incredibly good.

Looking forward to trying the demo (and hopefully the full game too.

I am surprised Unreal Tournament 2004 is not part of this initiative.

Come on, man.

I support reigning in corrupt oligarchs (full asset seizure, 20 years mandatory community service as a live-in junior janitor in a hospice care facility) as much as the next person, but this is stupid.

That’s ancient Rome, no? :)

As an early millennial, I can’t help but get good vibes from their 90s-era desktop UI.

The game concept and 80s retro-futurism are also appealing. 😃

I am really excited for this one. I did not expect anything from the original; I was very pleasantly surprised.

The 1.0 release is probably a good time to try it out. :)

I love the world-building and atmosphere in Caves of Qud. The soundtrack is also top notch.

But I just can’t get into the constant rogue-like combat. I wish there was a walking simulator or talking/charisma focused mode.

Minimum hardware requirements are likely to be performance (at relevant minimum resolution) and battery life at least on the same level as the current Steam Deck.

Was just going to say that I remember this being a feature in pre-1.0 Counter-Strike in the beginning of the 2000s.

Project Highrise - the unofficial sequel to SimTower

Cloud Emperium Games and Star Citizen.

They constantly lie about all sorts of matters (progress, release dates, financial matters, state of the company).

Many of their senior community managers are openly disrespectful to their backers.

The founder, Chris Roberts, put his unqualified wife as CMO (she openly admitted to not knowing how metrics worked or what is SEO), while coming up with a fake last name for her and warning employees to keep their mouths shut about the fact they were married.

The funny thing is, I believe RAM is actually one component that isn’t manufactured as much in China (compared to other components).

All good. That’s a fair point.

I am getting too paranoid. :)

[ignore, need to drink coffee]

I was borderline thinking of re-editing the headline to something along the lines of:

Proposed US tariffs may significantly raise gaming hardware costs for US gamers

But then decided against it as I generally think it’s best to avoid title edits (other than minor corrections/edits that are explicit).

Thanks for sharing, this looks interesting.

VW Beetle in Beetle Crazy Cup

It is extremely hard. From what I’ve heard sales of ~10,000 units is considered a strong showing in the indie scene.

The whole market is extremely top heavy. You have have a few big winners that see runway success, a slightly larger group with modest “break even plus” type performance and 10,000 of thousands of indie devs that get no coverage whatsoever. In addition to having a well thought out and implemented concept (which is extremely difficult to do), you need a lot of luck.

IMO, the challenge lies in the lack of discoverability; an extremely difficult challenge for any consumer-facing marketplace. The major consumer stores (Steam, Apple, Google) don’t have any real incentive to work on discoverability since it’s so hard and they have a quasi-monopoly anyway. The topics-focused independent communities that were big drivers of discoverability (especially in mid-market and niche segments) in the 90s and 2000s are all dead or dying. You do have youtube which offers a modicum of coverage of niche segments, but then we are back to square one; discoverability of mid-market and niche channels. And Google is more focused on engagement (“the next quadrillion customers!1!11”) and competing with TikTok, there is simply not enough competition for them to care.

I think it really depends on the game (genre?).

I mostly play economic strategy / tycoon games and the forums are pretty chill. The most “controversial” threads revolve around gameplay mechanics discussion or perhaps complaints about lack of updates.

I don’t think I’ve even seen anything approaching what you are describing in economic strategy game forums.

I would most definitely oppose shutting down the steam forums.