I think those craving strategy were some of the earliest adopters of gaming, especially once those games became increasing popular. It’s no surprise then that their numbers would be diluted over time, especially once you start including mobile gamers (who I think are different enough to not really warrant being compared to other gamers). As someone who played some strategy games in the 90s, it was a wild time:
real-time games like Dune, Command & Conquer, Homeworld, Age of Empires, Myth
turn-based stuff like Ogre Battle, Fire Emblem, X-Com, Jagged Alliance
the ungodly amount of grid-based civil war and cold war games and the beginnings of what could be called grand strategy, such as Panzer General, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Star Wars Rebellion, Europe Universalis (2000 but not really a stretch to include imo)
4X games like Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion
stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else like The Guild, Majesty, Carrier Command, Battlezone… (might be misremembering release dates here)
We are still getting a lot of good strategy games even in recent years, like The Last Spell, They Are Billions, Beyond All Reason, half the stuff SplattercatGaming covers…
I imagine that there is a lot of cross-over between strategy, city-builder, logistics and sim players especially if you single out Germany lol. All those genres are “shrinking” if you are only looking at them as a percentage of total gamers, but actually they slowly grow all the time.
Clearly game journos and I are playing different games because things are great so long as you drop AAA (garbage) and multiplayer FPS (cheating).
GPU prices are a bit stupid but I have been playing/buying with a new rule lately and it’s great: if it doesn’t play well on the Steam Deck, I just don’t buy it. Problem solved.
I was going to say, I could have sworn someone else had done this before.
Still this just makes me wonder what we could accomplish if we could get everyone the quality of education private schools offer, but as a public system. Finland banned schools from charging fees, meaning they have the same solid level of education for everyone, and it clearly has benefitted them and decreased inequality.
So much wasted potential in our nations, it hurts to see it.
I honestly don’t care about “underpowered hardware” and other similar crap. I do care about having to pay a sub just to get cloud saves, Nintendo’s excessively restrictive policies, their obsession with litigating fans, their frustrating inability to understand modern multiplayer, and their increasing desire to rehash the same games many times.
The only reason I owned a Switch was for on-the-go gaming because gaming on phones is a joke, and now I have a Steam Deck.
I’ve got some young kids and the Steam Deck makes it a lot easier to take them places and keep myself (or them) entertained. It also means I can get some game time in while they watch their shows.
Best part was taking it in vacation, plugging it into a TV, and using it like a console we all play together. It felt like I was sitting on the floor playing N64 with my siblings again lol.
I’ve loved having this thing. I still do more gaming on my PC but I’m glad I bought it.
The kids really like the beat em ups like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Streets of Rage. They also like Wobbly Life and Wobbledogs (though you will probably want a mouse for that one). N+ was a hit too.
Of course I’ve got some emulated stuff too and you can’t go wrong with Super Mario World, Golden Axe, or Gauntlet Legends.
Beyond his backtracking on election reform when early results indicated it’d be a long, tough battle to actually change and re-educate people?
Trudeau Liberals bailed the moment they saw they weren’t going to get the ranked ballots they wanted because literally everyone else (including all the advocacy groups) were backing Mixed-Member Proportional.
He ran on transparency, and while he has been faaaar more transparent than Harper, thats a low bar, and I expect better.
This is the same government that is sending hundreds and thousands of completely censored pages to committees. This isn’t better than Harper, this is right out of the same playbook.
Hes had his share of scandals, which isn’t good (SNC, ArriveCan, off the top of my head)
In all honesty, ArriveCan likely didn’t have as much to do with the Liberals as it did with a long broken procurement process. SNC on the other hand was a direct perversion of justice by the Liberals and Trudeau himself and that alone warrants removal in my eyes.
I am very left and would not vote Conservative, but the Liberals have shown they are just as capable of crony capitalism, and they are willing to protect Canada’ oligarchs and the economic pyramid scheme.
If only Singh wasn’t an ass we might see another orange wave, but as long as he’s busy protesting Quebec’s culture that’s never going to happen and Canada will remain divided.
A man stabbed six people to death at a busy Sydney shopping center Saturday before he was fatally shot, police said, with hundreds fleeing the chaotic scene, many weeping as they carried their children. Eight people, including a 9-month-old, were injured....
By now, everyone in the world knows that American tipping culture is getting out of hand. That doesn’t mean you can’t introduce another way of “supporting” creators. Mike Ybarra, the former president of Blizzard, shared his desire to tip developers of especially enjoyable games....
On the Canada/Trudeau front, you’re ultimately correct but it’s a bit worse when you examine the details:
Trudeau Liberals put together a committee to examine the options and recommend what would work best as a new electoral system. The Liberals recommended ranked voting: as the Liberals are the default first or second option for nearly everyone, this benefitted them the most. The Conservatives, New Democrats, and most independent actors favoured Mixed-Member Proportional, which is a variant of proportional representation with locally elected Members of Parliament and additional seats in the House of Commons to balance the total number of MPs and votes for each party. This system was expected to allow for more smaller parties to operate and would end the forever Liberal/Conservative control of Canada.
The Liberals put out a poll which used intentionally misleading questions and answers to try to guide responses towards ranked ballots. This effort failed due to a series of information campaigns from just about everyone with an interest in electoral reform, and ultimately the Mixed-Member Proportional system came out as the leading choice.
The Trudeau Liberals deemed the whole process and failure and completely dropped it, refusing to discuss it ever again.
There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor. Their faith was been shaken by an Arrowhead community manager they believed they found to be (gasp)...
This seems like some made up shit. For all 5 people who don’t seem to get the stinging nature of this game’s satire, I just can’t bring myself to care.
With the level of vertical integration Loblaw has, they could easily be playing a shell game with the various stages the food goes through and just bleeding all the money out.
Then you get shit like Stellaris that fundamentally changed their game at least two times. It’s not even close to the game I originally bought, and I say that with mixed feelings.
Stardew is in a good place, it doesn’t need to change. If you want Stardew-but-not then play something else, plenty of good games. Slime Rancher, Core Keeper, Sun Haven…
I don’t know where the term micro came from because $20 skins are not a “microtransaction”. Hell the $4 microcontrollers I just bought from Aliexpress weren’t a microtransaction. “Micro” makes me think in the sub-$1 range or so.
Nobody is mad that Civilization and Factorio cause us to accidentally pull all-nighters, they’re mad that the latest Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, and other similar games are designed to extract as much money as possible from people.
Once upon a time people worried about MMO addiction and that was before they added $40 horses. I was on the other side back then, now game publishers can go fuck themselves.
There are plenty of leftists who aren’t pieces of shit that we could support instead of this clown. I don’t know why people keep giving this guy a platform.
Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk....
Just like the Heard vs Depp case, people have already decided on the truth and they don’t care that the evidence at trial painted a very different story than the one liberal media told you to believe.
Like you said, Kyle was a dumb kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he was retreating every single time he shot someone. I hate this case because I’m left in the awkward position of defending a rightoid but that trial was very thorough and those are the facts.
Kyle works in that state and did not “bring the rifle across state borders” which just cements to me that so many of you did not follow the trial. You’re speaking from a position of ignorance.
Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident....
During a game’s development, narrative consultants will be hired by studios to help with fleshing out or tweaking narrative elements, Kenney said. “Narrative consultants do not get final say,” Kenney reiterated. "It doesn’t get into the game if we [as the developer] don’t approve it....
A Sweet Baby Inc co-founder said at GDC that they rely on fear to force developers to bring in DEI consultants. One of their founders also has had some spicy things to say about white males.
Sweet Baby Inc is not likely responsible for AAA gaming largely being disappointing (I blame that on monetization and an unwillingness to innovate), but why would I want to support people who extort their way into business and hate me for my immutable characteristics?
A few weeks ago the community manager of the Helldivers Discord got upset and deleted the whole thing. Years of discussions and knowledge (and memes) gone.
Naturally you can’t even bring up the idea that a Discord community takes on a life past its “owner” once it reaches a certain size or level of activity. “Your container, your rules” say the defenders unironically, while not acknowledging that you neither own the “server” nor make all the rules.
You can earn the premium currency in-game but the rate is quite slow. Purchasing a 1000 Super Credit item is likely to take between 25-100 hours, and is equivalent to $10.
The monetization and kernel-level anticheat that breaks Linux support erased any interest I had. The game itself looks like it would be fun but I’m done with buying minimum viable product GaaS crap.
They have a premium currency you can earn in-game called Super Credits (SCs). You use SCs to buy cosmetics, premium armor, and “Warbonds” (aka battle passes). The premium store stuff rotates but the Warbonds do not, and they do not expire.
This is less abusive than recent crap like Destiny 2 and Darktide, but “just the tip” isn’t that much better than getting entirely fucked so I’m going to hold off until the hype dies and people can actually properly talk about the grind.
Planetside 2 is more-or-less supported by whales who buy up the massively overpriced "micro"transactions. The devs intentionally make it excessively difficult to get the important and even game changing implants unless you buy the packs that contain them ($80 each btw).
The devs also nerfed vehicles into the ground because the lead designer was an infantry main, but simultaneously they see no issue with cloaked ATVs running down a whole line of people.
Let’s not forget pocket orbital strike and the incredible harm that has done to the game…
“Palworld is now one of only seven games that have seen over 1 million concurrent players on Steam – the others include: PUBG (3.2 mil), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.8 mil), Counter-Strike 2 (1.4 mil), Lost Ark (1.3 mil), Dota 2 (1.2 mil), and Cyberpunk 2077 (1 mil).”
I’m not speaking from a source, I’ve been following the CoH story since the SCoRE server got leaked. Basically sometime after CoH shut down, the SCoRE folks started the private server and kept it as secret as possible. They ran the server for years before information successfully got out in a way they were not able to suppress. Among the many things they did, they had an alternate version of CoH running that was just the character designer and the ability to walk around the city. They said it was all that could be saved of CoH and used that to throw everyone off the trail any time leaks came out.
SCoRE eventually did share code, but they excluded some things including the work they did to update the game and the mission files, and they only did so after the community went absolutely nuts.
It took a while for other servers to make the game playable, but Homecoming was up within days of the “leak” and was using the newer version SCoRE had developed. They have since lost their lead on updates to Thunderspy and Ouroboros, but Homecoming remains the most popular server. Homecoming is taking donations but operates as an LLC. The donation amounts they say they need are very substantial and I doubt their costs are accurate. They claim they are working on becoming a non-profit but they have been saying that for a long time.
This is not a bad write up but it and the linked articles will be missing some context. Example: the person they call “Leo” in one of the attached articles is one of the assholes who hid everything and ran Homecoming. Kind of changes the tone a bit.
I don’t love how many DLCs there are for Helldivers 1 but that way of doing things has some advantages over in-game shit with funny money credits that you can’t buy in the amounts you actually need. The most important one imo: the monetization is in plain-sight, visible before you even buy the game. Like Paradox strategy games, if the DLC being worth more than the game (sometimes several times over) bothers you, at least they’re upfront about it.
Darktide goes to some lengths to hide that its skin packs cost a lot, and some new or particularly desirable ones cost more than the amount of aquilas you get from the “Imperial” edition.
Team Fortress 2 reaches o overwhelmingly negative recent reviews (store.steampowered.com)
Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die (www.techspot.com)
Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds (www.ign.com)
PC gaming getting worse every year (www.xda-developers.com)
Helldivers CEO speaking to PlayStation partners and Valve to undo de-listing of countries. (twitter.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/1dcb1f99-5168-4d01-83e9-98b47b0312d4.png
Teens come up with trigonometry proof for Pythagorean Theorem, a problem that stumped math world for centuries (www.cbsnews.com)
Nintendo Switch 2 Will Be A "Conservative Hardware Evolution"; To Feature Full Backward Compatibility, 1080p Screen (wccftech.com)
Older patient gamers: what is your preferred gaming platform?
I used to be a PC-only gamer but the older I get the more I gravitate toward very ‘simple’ platforms....
Budget Astroturfing in Full Effect (lemmy.ca)
Crazy how the only one of these airing criticism that says the budget isn’t doing enough is the publicly owned one.
A Golden Axe animated series is in the works at Comedy Central (www.destructoid.com)
'Run, run, run': Chaos at a Sydney mall as 6 people stabbed to death, and the suspect fatally shot (apnews.com)
A man stabbed six people to death at a busy Sydney shopping center Saturday before he was fatally shot, police said, with hundreds fleeing the chaotic scene, many weeping as they carried their children. Eight people, including a 9-month-old, were injured....
Former Blizzard President Thinks Tipping Game Creators Is Great Idea (80.lv)
By now, everyone in the world knows that American tipping culture is getting out of hand. That doesn’t mean you can’t introduce another way of “supporting” creators. Mike Ybarra, the former president of Blizzard, shared his desire to tip developers of especially enjoyable games....
Tankies hate this one simple trick (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Helldivers 2’s Politics Appear To Be Flying Over The Heads Of Some (www.forbes.com)
There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor. Their faith was been shaken by an Arrowhead community manager they believed they found to be (gasp)...
32 per cent of Canadians blame grocery stores for rising food prices, more than any other reason: Nanos (www.ctvnews.ca)
Stardew Valley is basically the same game 8 years later (www.polygon.com)
60 Percent Of Playtime In 2023 Went To 6-Year-Old Or Older Games, New Data Shows (kotaku.com)
CD Projekt Red still 'don't see a place for microtransactions' in singleplayer games (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits (www.pcgamer.com)
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes (lemmy.world)
Kyle Rittenhouse storms off stage after being confronted by students (www.newsweek.com)
Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk....
People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One (www.wired.com)
Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies (www.nytimes.com)
Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident....
Spider-Man, Alan Wake, Ridiculous Fishing devs speak up in support of consultancy studio Sweet Baby Inc (www.eurogamer.net)
During a game’s development, narrative consultants will be hired by studios to help with fleshing out or tweaking narrative elements, Kenney said. “Narrative consultants do not get final say,” Kenney reiterated. "It doesn’t get into the game if we [as the developer] don’t approve it....
EA CEO talks AI, says the usual stuff before the bong rip hits and he starts blabbing about a future where 3 billion people are creating EA's games with it (www.pcgamer.com)
Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects (drewdevault.com)
World of Warcraft's subscription is about to get almost 3,000% more expensive in Argentina—and it'll 'only get worse with inflation' (www.pcgamer.com)
Helldivers 2 is currently #1 on the Steam top sellers list for paid games in the US. It's ahead of Palworld. It's also the #1 most pre-ordered game on the PlayStation Store in the US and other regions (twitter.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/6f7675b9-3077-4cd4-806e-fd3c5cdf410f.png...
Even after Fortnite, there's still something essential about the MMOFPS (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Love seeing PlanetSide getting shout outs still
Palworld Becomes the 7th Game Ever to Reach 1 Million Concurrent Players on Steam (www.githyp.com)
“Palworld is now one of only seven games that have seen over 1 million concurrent players on Steam – the others include: PUBG (3.2 mil), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.8 mil), Counter-Strike 2 (1.4 mil), Lost Ark (1.3 mil), Dota 2 (1.2 mil), and Cyberpunk 2077 (1 mil).”
Easy Mode Is Actually for Adults (www.theatlantic.com)
‘City Of Heroes’ Fan Server Will Continue With An Official License From The Developer (www.techdirt.com)
Helldivers 2 - PC Features Trailer | PS5 and PC Games (www.youtube.com)