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vulgarcynic

@vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works

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vulgarcynic,
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I am so, so close to doing the same. Still have a small partition carved out for CoD and Windows. I just find myself booting in to it less and less.

Thank goodness MicroVision seems to be keen on continuing to flog that dead horse with a Warzone focus, means I can finally be free.

vulgarcynic,
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I’ve been slowly playing through the first one. Its a pretty decent game. There’s some unique stuff they’re doing lore/world wise. The combat could be tighter and the waypointing could use some work but there’s a great core and lore. This could be Spiders breakout game.

vulgarcynic,
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Flashbacks to the guys doing coke at parties in college.

vulgarcynic,
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Also posting from a Pixel 7 running Graphene for abouta year. No issues, I use Fdroid for most apps and Aurora when I have too. Only bummer is I haven’t found a good FOSS keyboard with swipe. Really miss gboard for that and gif insertion.

vulgarcynic,
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Thanks for the rec! Typing on it now. Pretty decent so far. I dig the hover on the word as i swipe

vulgarcynic,
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I have seen credits on that game probably three times since it’s launch. Anytime they release it on a new platform I instinctively snap it up.

I do agree that the world feels pretty empty, but it is Mars in their defense. The gameplay loop is so good though. And sometimes there’s no better feeling than grabbing a sledgehammer and leveling a building.

Hopefully you’re able to make it through! There’s a little bit of variety introduced to the environment around the half to three quarter mark.

vulgarcynic,
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If you look at the overall cost of running a platform though, especially one that does several things, you can see where that 30% becomes viable.

A few things to highlight are, long-term storage and availability of purchases. There is not a single game I have bought on Steam in close to 20 years that I can’t still download and play to this day. Many of those are games that are no longer available for sale on the storefront yet valve as a content provider keeps them available to me and likely will in perpetuity.

There’s an argument to be made that storage is cheap but they are also storing other people’s things that are no longer generating revenue for them. Also, they are providing the bandwidth for us as users to download those games whenever and as many times as we like without concern for how many copies of title sold or who the initial publisher or developer was.

When you look at something like a console provider such as Nintendo or Microsoft who will completely shut down legacy stores, it makes the value of valve taking a unilateral 30% all the more attractive. Anything I buy on Steam I will be able to download and play in perpetuity. That 30% goes to making sure this isn’t just for big-name or the current hot shit. This is for everything ever put on their platform.

Sure, in a vacuum 30% seems like a lot but when you consider the overall maintenance costs and the fact that they have seemed to be pretty pro-consumer all along, The intrinsic value in what they’re offering becomes a lot easier to see.

vulgarcynic, (edited )
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I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.

I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of “The Club” that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don’t know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.

Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.

I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn’t worth it.

I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.

Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve’s cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.

vulgarcynic,
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I don’t begrudge him running a successful business. And I didn’t give a shit about who you feel I can or cannot defend. Lol.

vulgarcynic,
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Phil’s out of the circle of trust. Don’t believe a single thing from his mouth.

vulgarcynic, (edited )
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I couldn’t disagree more. I played through as a 100℅ hacking corpo my first run and it was great (120 hours total give or take). I only used guns when necessitated by the mission at hand.

To double check it wasn’t a design issue, I played full melee / gorilla arms after the 2.0 update and am having a blast at around 40 or so hours in.

These play through were on literally every possible platform (Stadia, Xbox 1 & Series X, PS5, Steam Deck, GeForce Now, desktop 3080 and recently 4080 mobile) so graphics weren’t always the primary draw.

If you choose not to engage with the world or systems, that’s a choice but it certainly isn’t a failing of the game. There’s an incredible world and cast of characters in Cyberpunk.

vulgarcynic,
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There was a great response to this from Gabe several years ago (looks like 13 years ago, fuck, I’m old)…

totalgaming.co.uk/93-of-steam-users-born-on-janua…

vulgarcynic,
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Been playing it off and on since I got my Steam Deck. I’d say portability does suit it pretty well. It’s a great pick up and play for a bit, complete a few missions and save / suspend game.

There’s a lot to do and see, it just has a problem feeling repetitive if you try to marathon sessions.

vulgarcynic,
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Nextlander is still going strong and independent. GiantBomb is in a good spot again as well. They have corpo-overlords but are still producing good content.

vulgarcynic,
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Single NVME and single SD slot. However, upgrading the NVME is a breeze. The entire device is designed to be user serviceable and Valve provides steps for reinstalling the OS on their site.

vulgarcynic,
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I haven’t finished a 1st party game on PS5 yet. Started and bounced off Forbidden West, GoW Ragnarok, and Ghost of Sushima.

Watched my partner play through Ratchet, that was the reason we bought the console but I just can’t be arsed to play through any of the other games.

It’s wild after platinuming both Zero Dawn and GoW on PS4. There’s just something… boring about the gameplay loop that I bounced right off of.

vulgarcynic,
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I’m fully expecting Windows 365 to replace their desktop offerings as 10 goes EoL and 11 adoption slows in the Enterprise space.

They know the money is in enterprise and it’s a nightmare currently to maintain desktop os’es with Defender as the EDR.

Shift that to the cloud and use Entra for access? It’s a new golden goose. Patching is simplified and you can continually charge for compute and telemetry access. Why wouldn’t they go this direction?

vulgarcynic,
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The first one has its flaws, especially in combat and pacing. But this is pretty much any spiders game.

That said, they did a really good job creating lore and a world that was fun to explore and live in. Looking forward to this sequel.

vulgarcynic,
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On the bright side, I don’t think we’ll have to buy them again. We can play them with a Exclusivity Plus Ultra Platinum Day 0 Premium++ with Squenix 385/2 Materia Edition Subscription™️ for only $50 a month!

vulgarcynic,
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Worth checking the bias on the reporting here. Very right leaning for the majority of the outlets making these claims.

ground.news/…/un-revises-gaza-death-toll-almost-5…

vulgarcynic,
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There’s not many Xbox only games that aren’t multi-platform at this point (queue more Xbox has no games / Microsoft turn and burns another studio memes).

vulgarcynic,
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I renewed by doing the $1 dollar deal again a year or two ago… racked up another 3 years at the time.

As a Game pass user from Day 1 I evangelized it to everyone I knew. Especially going in to this console generation.

Now though, I see no purpose to it. Microsoft has dropped the bag in a unbelievable way when it comes to dropping exclusives / first party games.

It’s not so much the Netflix of games as it is the Tubi…

vulgarcynic,
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You know, that’s fair. They haven’t shit on us… yet. 😁

vulgarcynic,
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I get that for some users. In my case, 90% of what’s in the catalog that I’d be interested in I already own. I know this isn’t the standards, but it’s what happens when you’re an avid Steam Gamer with a Humble Sub and a collecting problem.

I joined Game pass to have Xbox live to play with my console buddies and for day one exclusive access. At this point, I’ve moved most of them on to PC and Xbox has done nada with my 5 or so years of subscription.

vulgarcynic,
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Of all those, Rich is the least unexpected.

vulgarcynic,
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Oh man, I was about 3/4ths thru that episode. Spoiler…lol

vulgarcynic,
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Goddammit I hate that I laughed at this.

vulgarcynic,
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Been waiting for the tide to turn on Phil. He’s a new breed of shifty corpo and a lot of the communities have been fooled by his “aww shucks, I’m just a gamer too” persona.

You don’t get that far at a place like Microsoft without creating some bodies. But, we all want to hope the next guy will be different.

Spoiler: they never are.

vulgarcynic,
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Eternal optimism isn’t always a bad thing. Phil played his cards well. I never really knew or cared much about him until his Giant bomb at Night appearances and he seemed legit during those some 7 or 8 years ago. Considering the clout Jeff from from GB had, Phil got a little of that by proxy from my perspective.

vulgarcynic,
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Man, forgot about that tool. What a joke. He went on to fuck up other game studios IIRC.

vulgarcynic,
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I don’t work in the gaming side of the industry but I’ve been in tech for a few decades myself as well. I have (luckily) avoided similar situations but I’ve seen it happen to folks that I worked with where they were laid off by some shit bag CEO who didn’t know fuck from shit and then ended up being the head of the company they went to a few years later and pulled the exact same maneuver. It’s wild how once you reach a certain level you’re basically too big to fail there is no consequences for you other than a golden parachute until you land the next gig with your crony buddies.

I hope you’ve landed at a better place that at least provides some semblance of stability. Good luck out their friend.

vulgarcynic,
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That last line is my biggest concern. I’ve been gaming since the early 80’s and it’s ridiculous watching all the talent and studios be sucked up and shit out by quarterly profits. After 20 some odd years in the tech industry you’d think I’d be hardened against it, but video games were always my escape from the mundanity of daily life, now that same shit is spilling in to my hobby. What a fucking joke the industry is becoming. I honestly hope for another large collapse like the Atari years. There’s enough indie devs out there to keep us playing while the biggest players sulk off to other “investment opportunities”.

vulgarcynic,
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Does this qualify the game for a refund under Steams EULA at all?

vulgarcynic,
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Related note, is there a Skyblivion Lemmy community? I used to follow this project in Reddit, would be cool to do the same here.

vulgarcynic,
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As a reddit refuge and former long time troller of r/sleepingdogs, this warmed my heart. Ty stranger.

vulgarcynic,
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Just pulled the trigger on this (ha!). Opened Lemmy while it’s downloading… and it’s done. Well timed.

vulgarcynic,
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This is 100% the dystopian reality we are heading for. Maybe not in the near-term future but, there is no way that eventually corporate greed and shareholder gains won’t reach a point that this has to become the reality. They are simply leaving too much money on the table by not doing it.

I think our only saving grace is that the laws haven’t been defined enough yet to prevent this from happening. But I have to imagine to some degree it already is. Just look at the way driving telemetry is being sold to auto insurance providers in the States already. If the information is out there, someone will get their hands in it and use it to manipulate the price of something.

vulgarcynic,
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This was my first thought as well! Good call.

vulgarcynic,
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I think the counter arguments from the reddit threads are pretty big points.

Good Battlefield plays like something different than the other major offerings. BF2, BC2 and BF4 are all modern military shooters but they “feel” way different than a CoD or Counterstrike or anything else.

The scale is important but so is the struggle of a tight pitched rush push with limited tickets left. Sure, a good pilot is a pain in the ass, but it’s part of what makes Battlefield work. Same with tanks. Man, Golmud and the fucking tanks…

Anyways, just because someone is paid to do something doesn’t mean they’re an expert in all the relative disciplines. I don’t really follow any streamers, but I do work in a pretty specialized industry and know that just because a peer and I are technically in the same field, what we bring to the table, how we approach problems and the way we implement solutions can be wildly different.

Don’t ask him the best strats for Quake 3 and don’t ask me anything about Counterstrike. Otherwise, you’ll be sadly disappointed and end up with a worse experience overall.

I’d like to believe Dice made the best call here, despite what a shit show BF2042’s launch was (even if basically every BF launch from 3 on has been fucked). They set the standard for rough launches years ago and yet every new release comes with doomsayers predicting the studio being closed and the game dying. Yet the reality is, they almost always, eventually get their shit together and patch things up to the way it should of been at launch. Just like most other major devs at this point.

vulgarcynic,
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It not being the same 8 ball that Bushnell and those Atari guys consulted back in the day may be the greatest failure.

But in all honesty, I think that’s a great analogy. There’s no harm in bringing in competent consultation, but you have to choose wisely. This is more akin to a movie screening. It just so happened to be a test audience that has traditional been compensated for their opinions…

vulgarcynic,
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Not exactly the timeline you’re putting out but, my son was about a year old when I remember getting GTA 4 on launch. He’s in his freshman year of college now…

vulgarcynic,
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“Here’s a box for your personal items, Steven will show you out.”

vulgarcynic,
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Renowned Fighting Scientist Matt Rorie?!

vulgarcynic,
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The amount of my life that I have confused Jason and Matt is almost insufferable. I accept what a terrible person I am.

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