Hilarious that this is being promoted on Xbox. Absolutely ridiculous Sony didn’t keep this team going.

Till it doesn’t.

Never trust google to maintain a service. Pixel VPN and the Pixel 2 year upgrade program say hi.

There is. Plenty of giant titties on trad wives in the Steam category for porn games. Oddly that seems to overlap with this audience strongly…

Good, now you just have to avoid buying from…

checks staff lists

Every single major publisher.

Good luck. Don’t play that woke Call of Duty or that DEI Fortnite while you’re at it. And avoid the mind virus of Elden Ring and Bandai Namco.

It’s trying and I paid for it. But the swiping accuracy is shit still, and it has limited language support.

Stop buying their shit then. Leave the people who make it the fuck alone.

“Go woke go broke” vote with your dollars and let their “wokeness” fail in the free market. Don’t fucking harass people.

Your confidence in this statement is hilarious the fact that it doesn’t help your argument at all. If anything, the fact they refined their model so well on older hardware is even more remarkable, and quite damning when OpenAI claims it needs literally cities worth of power and resources to train their models.

20 mil is peanuts. Selling shit to children for as long as you can is worth way more. FTC has proven that exploiting kids with gambling mechanics is just good business.

Major difference is that TV and your examples aren’t a firehose free for all of content. There is at least a minor barrier to entry. Which helps stem some of the tide at least.

The same applies for Epic as well regarding piracy. Again it’s just a matter of diversifying.

If I had to rebuy 100% of my games, Id never adopt Epic at all. Atleast this way the library has something of value as an alternative without costing me a fortune.

I’m thinking even farther back to their wretched Windows Live and then Games for Windows Live platform (now dead). MS is one of the biggest companies on earth and couldn’t find a cohesive way to migrate that game ownership forward.

I just like to own the things I own. And I’m more worried about someone hijacking my account because they want some bullshit inventory item or something than getting banned for something toxic. Account theft is sadly still pretty common.

Absolutely. But if someone got you in one of those steam inventory scams or stole your access token, it sucks if you lose your entire game library and have all your eggs in one basket.

So having a bunch “backed up” so to speak with Epic gives some peace of mind. VAC bans aren’t common for most users, but they do make mistakes sometimes.

This is the point though. They have beefed up my Epic Games library to the point where if I got banned from Steam, I would have a viable fallback.

That cannot be understated. It has a network effect and makes adopting it as a new platform versus a legacy one with two decades behind it, far easier to adjust to.

I love that at least someone is really trying other than MS with their poorly supported windows games store attempts.

Or your “time clock earth sounds” app from the not so well policed appstore takes silent background screenshots, grayscales them and sends them to their host for OCR.

I agree this permission is annoying. But I differ in I feel it should be system controlled and can be invoked by apps that identify specific fields to be blocked, instead ofnjusy disabling it outright.

TBH, on ancient insecure systems that might work.

Not very exciting though

And you are missing my point.

You don’t trade one for the other. You add this in the options menu, in a smaller font.

Then when The Crew, X-Defiant, Lawbreakers, or any of the 30 other games that AAA publishers end server support for this year go down, the people who bought it aren’t left unable to play at all. Theres a fallback. And it does not affect matchmaking because it’s down the menu out of the way, and not the default matchmaking method. L

Sorry man, but the fundamental backend of IP based matchmaking is a prerequisite to skill based matchmaking. At a high level, the skill rankings make an ELO value or similar ranking and feed that alobg woth player status into the active player pool for the region. The active player pool then feeds the game client the ip sets for the current match.

Literally all these games are peer hosted, and require this. Once the match is setup they literally drop you into a lobby (this part is visible to you) and fill it with IPs (invisible). That is as old as DOOM.

So again, everything costs something as people aren’t free, but this is a function must exist to power the skill based matchmaking, and needs only be exposed in the shell.

Also, its not just valve, its literally every PC game ever made before the mid 2000s. Jedi Knight II? Unreal Tournament? Quake 3? Hell emulated PS3 and Switch titles have shown this off as well. All of these are still playable today thanks to not exclusively using skill based matchmaking.

Great wall of text, defeated by the simple idea of adding a fucking optional LAN or Lobby based matchmaking based on IP can be for unranked and takes near 0 effort to add.

You want the main game mode with matchmaking? Official ranked server.

Wanna play 2 vs 30 AK-47 vs knives only? Private lobby.

Also, the latter was how the original devs accidentally invented Left 4 Dead by figuring out that was a ton of fun.

Fuck Google chrome.