Paradoxvoid

This is useful for updates so you’re not bottlenecked as much (if you don’t have automatic background updates set up).

That article hurt a little to read - it’s not a T-Rex, it’s so obviously a Utahraptor I’m a bit flabbergasted that made it to print. But I guess not everyone had my obsession with dinosaurs as a child…

This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.

If I really hate front end, but still want a lot of the responsiveness of a SPA, I’d have to give ASP.NET Blazor a serious thought.

It’s largely all back end driven, with the dynamic elements driven via webassembly that pretty much works like black magic.

With GOG, you could theoretically download the offline installer, give that to someone else and then ask GOG support to remove BG3 from your account, and be fully abiding with the EULA conditions.

Holy shit, it’s actually impressive to tank that hard - not cresting more than 1000 concurrent players in over a month, and hasn’t been able to beat 5000 since November… I know people love throwing the ‘dead game’ meme around prematurely, but if this isn’t dead yet, it’s definitely got one foot in the grave.

But if it gets to the point where Ubisoft goes and every studio starts making their own, I don’t think that will work if they don’t have the game catalogue to support it, that would mean Ubisoft could just start churning out horrible games to build their stupid catalogue.

I feel like we’re starting to see a rerun of the streaming service wars - if this takes off across the industry I can definitely see people going back to piracy. I don’t want game pass, ubisoft+, Blizzard Prime, Nintendo Online Super Premium Expansion Pass or whatever stupid names these companies come up with just to play a few games that I’m interested in, just because they’re spread across different publishers.

Well Google has recently been forcing through its awful Web Environment Integrity proposal so…

Bobby Kotick is likely on the way out at least (probably via golden parachute).

Yeah I do understand the reasoning and honestly can’t fault them for it - they are a for-profit company after all.

Doesn’t mean that it’s not a good example of them throwing their weight around (which is admittedly rare).

Ironically this is actually an example of Valve using its dominant marketshare to suppress rivals - Steam’s ToS require devs to have equivalent pricing across all storefronts if they want to sell on Steam at all, so making it harder for cheaper storefront cuts to translate to lower prices to consumers, who might otherwise move to a different storefront.

Devs aren’t going to drop Steam as a store, so they’re stuck.

That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.

I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.

People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

Pretty sure it’s a triple whammy - Steamworks, always online, and denuvo to top it off.

I’d also argue Firefox is hardly mainstream at ~3% usage. Edge would be a better replacement given it comes with every Windows install (and many corporate environments don’t allow using an alternative).