What have you been playing recently?

We've decided that the little one's allowed to have a Microsoft account to be able to play Minecraft, so my Deck play recently has been doing multiplayer Minecraft on our home server with him on my desktop. It took some getting used to, but multiplayer Minecraft is always fun.

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Quoting: Vortex_AcheronticI really would like to see a more Steam Deck friendly store front. Maybe it is just me but browsing the Store on Deck feels a bit uncomfortable.

Store and Wishlist both. Although the automatic fullscreen of trailers is nice on the Deck, since it gives you an easy demonstration of what things like text size will look like there.

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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyMany modern Linux-based operating systems are just as easy to use as a typical Microsoft Windows operating system these days (certain distros could probably even claim they're easier to use!)

Way easier. Linux is what you give your parents so that you don't need to do Windows tech support.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut is the anticheat as effective as the Windows' counterpart? This has consistently been the reason companies provide for not enabling Linux support.

It's also exactly what you'd say if you couldn't be bothered to do something for a small audience and had necessarily-secret software to use as an excuse.

Maybe it isn't as effective; maybe it could be made as effective with sufficient effort; maybe they're repeating what their software vendor who can't be bothered told them. "We can't be bothered to do things because reasons" isn't by itself trustworthy.

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There's really no easy answer to the anti-cheat problem for Linux / Steam Deck gaming right now, aside from perhaps developers having things done server-side where the platform you're playing on is less of an issue, or cloud gaming where the game isn't even on your machine.

That was one of the things about Stadia: game devs made Linux-native games for it, and it didn't need client-side anti-tamper because everything was running server-side. Destiny 2 had a Linux-native build for it.

But the business model was pretty terrible, and Google has ADHD, so it ded.

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Quoting: PenglingIndeed - hell, credit cards were barely even a widespread thing, at the time.

Still, I assumed that the numbers were due to kids spending their own money (and if it is, that average is still a lot higher than I got back in my day :tongue:), and hadn't even considered the issue of them using credit cards without permission!

It's not exactly "without permission." The kid's account (or the parent's account if it's a shared device) gets access to the payment method for getting the game in the first place (or other applications if it's a F2P). The parent doesn't notice, and the kid has no idea - they just press the "get more jellybeans" button. Maybe the parent will notice come the end of the month, followed by a firm talking to, but perhaps not.

Game publishers have exploited this inexperience ruthlessly. Platform holders try to intervene and regulators try to curb the excesses, but there are fresh victims every day and there's money to be made.

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Quoting: Pengling

Data shows that children in Europe are spending on average €39 per month on in-game purchases.

Good lord, I never even got close to being given that much pocket-money in a month when I was a kid! :shock: That's a lot to spend on items that don't exist!

That's because, back in your day, you'd have some money that you'd be given or save up, and you'd spend a fixed amount of that in exchange for specific goods at the toy shop or sweet shop or wherever. You wouldn't have had invisible obfuscated access to your parents' credit cards for ephemera.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismThis man is a shark and should step down as CEO and all the other executives should get checked for corruption for letting this happen.

Wrong guy.

John Riccitiello was the CEO that killed trust in Unity. He's already gone.

Matthew Bromberg got rid of the Unity Runtime nonsense, as described in this article.

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The “Optimizing Game Files” screen has been optimized

That tickles me.

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This is a really weird thing to do.

It's still listed for sale on GOG and Steam. If you were trying to stop people getting your game anywhere but Netflix, you wouldn't remove it from the place that no one goes but leave it up where everyone is. Itch has the best costs (you can choose to pay Itch nothing if you want) and the best developer upload tools (you can throw essentially any file type at it, and Itch will take care of everything). Not putting your game on Itch can make sense because it's not going to generate a lot of traffic, but they already did that - they only need to do nothing and have some amount of money trickling in.

This is a PR own goal for absolutely zero benefit.

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