kbal

I remember admiring its art style when it first came out — it seemed to capture something beautiful about the landscape that reminded me of real Canadian wilderness. Now seems like a good time to try playing it.

Tetris has a CEO? Does she hang out with the President of Pong and the Mayor of Space Invaders?

Starting 3 years ago, it only took me about 3 years to mod it to perfection — which was another exercise in patience I guess.

It was good, although its age really showed even compared to the sequel which I’d already played. Strong start to the series. They did some kind of remaster a few years ago which was what reminded me to try the original, so maybe that’s worth it if you don’t like old-game mechanics.

It’s not been easy. There’s also Mass Effect, which I got around to playing last year — but that’s largely because I forgot about it after being patient about it for only a couple of years.

TES6

If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?

It’s a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There’s currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It’s the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they’re run the way they are now. You can’t reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.

Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.

The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.

Go game devs were super lazy, couldn’t even design interesting shapes for the pieces.

Maybe it’s just running on the wrong GPU?

The one that looks tempting which I might actually get around to playing some day if I buy it is Hades.

I wonder how much was for 2011 releases because apparently 86% of my time in Steam games this year was in Skyrim.

Maybe it is the movie studios, but there don’t appear to be any of them on the list of HDMI Forum members, or on its board of directors. So my first guess was some combination of Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Apple. Whoever it is though, the question is how they went about convincing the HDMI Forum as a whole to take such a self-destructive approach.

They’re not fucking with AMD and Valve just because they spontaneously developed an irrational hatred of partly-open platforms. Somebody has persuaded them that they have a financial incentive to do it.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected

It’s pretty weird that this organization that exists only to extract rents from people who want to use hdmi remains unwilling to do so even for a customer as large as Valve. I wonder who has given them the motivation for it, and how much it cost them.

Those who don’t support them are not serious about software quality.

What do you mean “people who don’t want a normal prebuilt”? That’s exactly what they’re going to be selling — a normal prebuilt from a vendor people trust with the economy of scale to sell it for a competitive price. It’s got an unusual form factor and some fancy hardware, but functionally that’s what it is.

Yes, that is the type of monopoly they have. It’s one that would probably not attract the attention of anti-trust regulators. If you’re not coming from the free software world I guess it looks like that’s the only way things can be.

Games that are linked with the Steam libraries, distributed through the Steam store, and launched through the Steam client.

It’s true though, Steam has a monopoly on Steam games.