Quoting: benstor214Why go after one single company? Something smells fishy…

Oh this one's an easy one to answer. Valve won their trial against patent troll Leigh Rothschild, which means they have angered a 1760s era banking family with their fingers in many, many pies, leading to countless new cases being filed against Valve in order to either get a bag or drain Valve's resources.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/valve-wins-trial-against-patent-170100758.html [External Link]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/valve-facing-uk-lawsuit-over-081228297.html [External Link]

This is in no way meant to support any antisemitic view of the Rothschilds, nor the conspiracies attached to the family, I just think it's a reasonable assertion that a patent troll with these kinds of financial and social connections would absolutely be petty enough to encourage this kind of legal cold war.

That being said, I cannot help but roll my eyes into the back of my head seeing Valve try to pull the same "surprise mechanics" crap that EA did.

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Quoting: neolithI cannot imagine that being a smart move financially. Most people I know who game on PC have bought at least on of the titles Sony brought over. Only one of them has a PS and most would never get one no matter which games they miss.

I don't know what Sony expected... That people start getting a PS after playing formerly exclusive games on PC? That everyone would start using PSN in one way or another?
They treated their PC customers less than stellar: forced PSN, Denuvo, intentionally breaking fetures on Linux, ports coming a year after their PS release at best... which is a shame, because some of those are technically quite good otherwise. I've always felt that bringing games to PC was a very good idea followed by a couple really bad ones.

After buying Bungie for way too much money, aiming to go full live service with about a dozen games, Concord arguably being the biggest finanical flop in gaming history and Marathon doing meh on Steam I thought they'd make some good decisions now that would make them some money. Seems like they don't want to do it on PC. Bummer. I'd have bought a PC version of Bloodborne in a heartbeat if it'd had been a proper port.

I don't know what'll happen to Sony if they keep making weird decisions, but seeing that they closed Bluepoint of all studios makes me think that a couple more will end up on the chopping block. I wonder who's next. My guess is that Horizon Hunters Gathering will be the end of Guerrilla. Well, we'll see...

So just to give Sony the smallest amount of credit here, apparently it's not actually their fault we've not seen a Bloodborne remake, much less a port to PC. Apparently it's all up to From Software, and they just don't seem to give a damn about it, which is...

I mean...

It's a choice.

Not one I'm happy with, but hey.

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I cannot help but question what the point of having a 2 controller limit was when that limit was *per transaction*. At the very least, that should be limited to 2 per account until they've got a better idea of the demand. And frankly, I find the attitude of saying "Don't bother trying to deal with the scalpers" to be rather ridiculous. The markups I was seeing on Ebay yesterday were honestly obscene, to say nothing of the fact that they're blatantly against Ebay's ToS given that there's no way any of those sellers actually have the product in hand like they're supposed to.

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Been following the dev since an artist I support on Patreon brought them to my attention, and I'm interested to see how the game goes, but I will say that the demo didn't wow me like I was hoping it would. From what I recall, it suffered from being a solo dev project that could really have done with more hands. But even with that said I'm willing to wait and see what the full release looks like.

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I was intrigued by the concept, the option to cut your other team members loose, but they sold me on it with the unknowable cosmic horrors at the end. Very interested to see what this one has in store!

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I have very mixed opinions on this title, namely in how the game of broken telephone has left key bits of context out. While Valve has not given an explicit statement of what caused the game to be crossed off the list, they did state that the reason the developers were asked to provide a build for Valve to review was due to the developers having marked the game as releasing in a few short months, necessitating the tight turnaround on providing a build for Valve to review. The developers statement on this was that they've never been asked to do this before, which may be true, but I assume that the quiet part not being stated out loud is that they had previously not set it to release so soon.

That being said, I don't necessarily think that should have precluded Valve reassessing the game afterwards, but I can understand a hesitance to do so when a developer has already provided you with a demo that has a child depicted in a morally grey scenario like that (assuming that is indeed the reason why it was even rejected in the first place, and again, that's something Valve could have made much more clear).

Outside of all of that, however, I think a more important point to call to attention that while GoG may have said "We’re happy to give HORSES a home on GOG, giving players another way to experience the game" and "Creativity deserves to be celebrated.", but while they did what I will ultimately say is the right thing this time, they failed to do the right thing with Red Candle Games' Devotion back in 2020. https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/16/22178225/red-candle-games-devotion-censored-steam-release-gog-date/ [External Link]

That's what sticks in my craw more than anything about this. This performative waving of "creativity being celebrated" and "giving these games a home on our platform". None of these storefronts, not a single one, has actually stood by that stance when the chips were down. Steam and Epic are the example today, but GoG failed Red Candle Games, Itch.io has and continues to cave to credit card companies, and Humble Bundle is just a more legitimate key store.

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So this is less paid beta test, more an opportunity to support Digital Extremes and demonstrate interest in this new title. Granted, when DE did this last time, it was essentially a hail mary to keep the studio from going broke, and now they have the backing of Tencent and such to fund their efforts. I'm still going to buy in anyway since I missed out on Warframe's founder program and I want to support a home grown developer.

As for the combat, I can at the very least say that it's getting better. I was in the original test very early on, more or less when they were just letting folks run the build that they initially showed off at Tennocon (the Warframe convention), and it was extremely clunky. It's no Arkham combat system, but I trust DE well enough to make it work, and it is better now, even if it still has a good ways to go last I played it over the summer.

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Just going to take a moment to once again steal this joke, because I love it too much not to beat it to death.

There's a very good name that nobody seems to be capitalizing on, and that's making it the Orange Box.

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I asked gemini to put the current AI against the timeline of the Hyperion books.

@Bumadar Stop that. You're not the first person I've seen do this, you probably won't be the last, but you're not making an interesting or valuable contribution to the conversation by using AI to write 3/4 of your comment.

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Eastern Exorcist looks gorgeous, Speed Freaks seems like it might be fun, and I think I recall hearing good things about Grapple Dog. WWE 2K25 might be fun, though I seem to recall support nor performance for those games being fantastic. Spellforce is grand strategy, which has never been my bag, and I've heard mixed things from folks on Plucky Squire's level of hand holding and such. Monkey Island is always nice, but man, that Destiny 2 bundle might be the worst deal of the whole thing. Ah yes, I'm sure that will draw me back into the game that stole the content I paid for, from the developer that's in so many pots of hot water at the moment.

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