I understand the lack of trackpads on a 3rd party controller, nobody has ever committed to them like Valve has. However no rumble is a deal breaker for me, it's a fantastic enhancement to games that use it properly. If it included rumble and had the left thumbstick and D-pad swapped to actually make sense, it would be one of the best controllers out there for sure.

In any case, it's a great start towards having 3rd party controllers that fully support the Steam Input API available in the market. Let's hope it starts a trend.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: chickenb00I wish Valve would incorporate AMD Chill into SteamOS: when I stop providing inputs, after a second or two drop my fps to my target minimum. When input occurs immediately ramp up fps to my target max.

I never heard of that one?!?
(And I didn't meet it. I'm usually playing stuff like point and click, but I did run some benchmarks, which should suffer from the same problem?)

It's not an issue that you'd come across, rather a feature that you intentionally activate to preserve battery life. I would hate it for most games personally, but in a few genres like puzzle games where I might look at a mostly static screen for a long time trying to figure out a solution, it makes sense.

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and 81,867 managed to dig out the whole map while playing

I'm one of those, couldn't resist :-D

It's a great game! And fantastic for the Deck.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI don't know how old you are, but parents with kids have been playing video games for decades.

Closing my 4th decade. I know they have been. They were few exceptions compared to now. Gaming wasn't normalised as it is now, and adults gaming were often mocked and seen as immature. It took people that had video games available at home as kids growing up and becoming adults themselves for this to (partly) go away, and this has only recently happened.

Anyway, this isn't even an argument about the intended purpose of Valve's Family sharing anymore, and I recognise we might have different experiences with you living in the US and me in Southern Europe, with video games being introduced en-mass on different timescales, so I'll just leave it at that it's fine if we disagree :smile:

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Quoting: Mountain ManThe short version is that Valve has finally closed an unintended loophole in the Family Sharing feature.

It is closing it, but all I'm saying is that it was very much intended, not unintended.

Steam was ~10 years old when Family Sharing was introduced (and PC gaming in general hadn't been more than a niche until another 10 years before that) and lots of gamers had siblings and friends to share games with, nephews at best, so that's exactly who Valve targeted with that feature.

Now Steam is ~20 years old, their playerbase demographic grew older and has little kids now, so they changed it. Good for them, but 100% intentional.

Seriously, picture 2013 in your mind. Remember, smartphones almost new, burgers cheap, Game of Thrones still in 3rd Season. How many people did you know that were both Steam Gamers and parents? I knew none. Compare that with how many you know now :smile:

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Finally!

Video Games Europe: "the real-world cost is clear and unambiguous at the point of purchase of the in-game currency." Yes, and then everything else gets obfuscated behind said in-game currency. What a clown excuse!

Nobody said customers don't actually know how much they pay for their in-game stupid stargemcoins, that btw don't ever get sold in packages that match the in-game items they are actually trying to get, so that they always have useless leftovers unless they buy even more. It's the items that are unclearly priced, and conveniently ignored in their statement.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThe simple fact is that family sharing was always intended for use by people living in the same residence, primarily so that parents could share games with their kids. If your sister is living on her own, then the expectation is that she will buy her own games.

Look, don't get hung up on the name "Family Sharing". Think of it as "local sharing" for a better understanding of the use case.

See the problem is that this isn't true. The new one certainly is primarily so that parents could share games with their kids and is very obvious. But it still fails to cover all families, like Liam's where there are 2 households involved in a kid's life. It's "Houshold Sharing" with a misleading name.

But for the system we had in place for so long, people claiming, like you, that it was always intended only for close families is, I'm guessing, your assumption. Because Valve themselves wrote in their description about the feature that it's made for sharing with your family, guests and friends. That's why there were restrictions like locking an entire library when one game was open, a limit of 10 devices, and needing a local login for every machine you wanted to authorise. And a lot of us had been using it up to this point like this, you visit someone, login, share your library and can keep 2-3 siblings and 2 really good friends on it for example (specifically my use case). And that's now being taken away, so it's valid criticism that we don't like the change.

I understand of course that the changes made are fantastic for parents with 1-2 little kids living in one home, which is a lot of people, so I get why it was done. I still don't like the changes for myself and others, they are restricting a feature we've known and used for 10 years.

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Quoting: Liam DaweI get that for how some people live, in that way it's a downgrade. But, I don't really believe a family sharing system is meant at all for different countries. That, really, feels like a bit of a stretch for Valve getting developers on board to allow games to be shared like this at all.

Different households in the same country though, that I feel they could (and should) relax on a bit. Like for me as a co-parent, the kiddo is between two houses in two completely different cities.

But Liam, people might change countries at any point, for example for studies or for a year of work. This is especially true in the EU, where there's even people commuting to work in a different country daily as borders are non-existent.

So just becoming 18 and moving for studies for example, doesn't suddenly make you non-family...

As MayeulC suggested above, keeping the old restrictive system to apply for distant sharing, would be enough to work things out with publishers, we've been using it fine for a decade now, and there were no issues.

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Quoting: TheBard

Quoting: razing32stories like these make me realize that when push comes to shove its best to have a backup copy of your game.

Quoting: IrisNebulaYou bought your game, you got your game. It has given you a DRM-Free installer that you can use whenever you want, as many times as you want. Even if new downloads are pulled, this shouldn't affect anyone much. Imagine going to a store and demanding a new copy of your game because you lost the game CD you bought there last year and being angry they won't service you. Infinite downloads for DRM-Free stuff is a courtesy and honestly they aren't even always provided by some software shops.

I get your point, but it's unfair. What I'll say won't concern Itch because they certainly have no responsibilities in this situation. And Itch's cut is freely set by the developer I think, so Itch is not responsible here. But here's the thing. The ability of to make a backup is very nice. It protects against the store shutting down, which happened for more than a few stores. And it protects against game updates that make old-version not accessible anymore. I'm a huge fan of backups and I did backup some of my games.

But we can not backup all our games. A modern game take around 50 to 100GB. Given that on modern computers, hards drives are around a few terabytes, a gamer could backup between 20 and 50 games on one hard drive. We could instead store backups on BD. They are much cheaper but keep in mind that modern games have regular updates. Updating the backups on BD to keep it up-to-date is not a simple and easy task. It takes a lot of time, effort and money. We need to take into account that physical storage's life span is not infinite. We need to make several copies to prevent fires, drawings, robberies, ... making some inaccessible. We could also store backups on cloud storage. But it's expensive and we would still have to update the backups every time a game is updated.

When games where distributed by physical copies, patches were rare and small. But today's updates are frequent and big. How much time and money would require maintaining all your backups up to date? Maintaining backups for more than 50 or 100 games would be quite big, both in terms of money and time. With sales and bundles, our collections grow very rapidly beyond that limit. What would you do when you would reach your limit of 50 or 70 games? You would be forced to stop playing new games until your limit increases.

The deal we make with a digital stores is that a cut of the price covers infrastructure cost. Digital stores act as cloud storage systems. I know that I can safely delete a game to make some space for another one because I will be able to download it again. They even save my saves in the cloud! That's a good model for us as long as they indeed let us download games again. And it's a good model for them. Storage is much cheaper for them because they can mutualize storage costs between customers. By taking care of storage for us, and being paid for that, we can buy more games. It's a win-win situation.

Of course the deal I'm talking about is an implicit one. Legally, the terms of the license are more more restrictive than that. But implicit deals do matter. Even if nothing forces stores, developers and editors to completely remove a game from a store, common usage when delisting a game is to let owners the ability to play it. As probably many here, I own several delisted games that I still play. I bet that a store that would have a limit or deadline for downloads would close very quickly.

What Night School is doing is awful. Dismissing the awfulness of their action by saying we have to do backups is unfair. The industry standard is to let owners play. I'm even sure that stores are OK with it. When you release a game on a store, when you take money from people, you have the moral responsibility to the people who bough this game. I know it's not a legal one, it's a moral one. Because it can be legal but unfair. This is the case here.

To Night School Studio: I had nothing against you. But such a bad move against your customers is really a huge betrayal. It shows that you have no respect for the people who supported you. Because taking the game on Itch is also a way to give you more money as Itch takes a lesser cut. Taking the game from our hands is unfair. How would you react if we took the money we gave to you back? Would you be happy? Another point. Do you really think I will pay again to play a game I already bought? You're forcing legal customers to rely on piracy, with all the risks it entails, to play a game they legally bought. Do I need to explain why it's bad?

If you can take the game back, then give the money back!

You do raise some very good points, and I totally agree with you about the publisher, this is a really bad move. I was only saying that itch isn't at fault here—especially since we're talking about itch of all stores, with its lax revenue model—as you said as well.

I am a little biased here, because huge games are not my thing usually, the vast majority of games I own/play are smaller indies that are rarely more than a few GB each. I just keep hundreds of them installed at any point and even more archived, as my internet speeds have always been bad anyway and I let downloads go when I'm doing something else, if I decide to play a game I don't already have on my disks, I'll be asleep before I can boot it up. Just my Steam Deck sits at more than 300 installed right now.

But I get that it's not always feasible to keep backups of 70GB or 150GB games, which do exist at this point. Although, if we want to be fair, I doubt anyone buys these at DRM-free stores like itch. Maybe a couple on GOG, but most of them only ever get released on Steam/Epic/Ubi/EA stores, which are all following the cloud storage / use-our-client-to-play model, so whatever I was saying doesn't apply to them. They are obliged to keep games online if bought there.

Anyway, it's a sensitive matter and everyone will have opinions on it of course, and that's ok. It's just, itch is really doing its best in this corporate world and I don't like seeing it being blamed for some greedy Netflix suits that decided to pull this game from it for some weird reason.

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Quoting: kuhpunktDon't make excuses for shitty stuff happening.
You buy stuff digitally with the understanding that you get to keep your games.

I make no excuses for anything, I just don't expect much either. When we are talking DRM-free, exactly as you said I buy stuff digitally with the understanding that I get to keep my games. That I get to keep them, not that someone else will do that for me.

When I buy games on Steam which I do for practicality reasons, I understand I risk them going away, even if Steam has promised to unlock them forever and let us keep them all if they ever go out of business, promises in the business world don't mean that much.

When I buy DRM-Free stuff, I know that I can keep them forever, and is exactly what I do. I download them and keep them. And I also have the option to make digital backups, which I usually can't even do with retail disks because of copy protections. It is the best deal as far as preservation goes, better than Steam, better than retail which you get with the understanding that you get only one copy as you said. I can make multiple copies of my digital downloads.

And no, I do not expect to be able to get them again forever, stuff disappears all the time on the Internet. Publishers can be ridiculous like Netflix here. Itch might go bankrupt tomorrow. Remember Desura? Yeap, I can't even recall how the site looked like anymore, but I still have copies of all the games I had on there that I cared about, along with all the other DRM-Free games I own.

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