Allowing games to be heritable lowers the rate of amortization. Sorry for bringing accounting terms into a gaming discussion, but it's important to recognise Valve's motivation.

When you buy a game, the publisher can't recognise 100% of the sale price as revenue straight away. They have to leave some part of the sale price for amortising the future cost of supporting the game - servers making downloads available in the future, developers fixing incompatibilities with OS upgrades, developing new features if a game ships with a roadmap and the publisher honestly wants to deliver it. You should only recognise the revenue proportionally to the remaining cost of the game. This means you should aim to only recognise the full revenue when the game requires no further support.

You can be a terrible company and cancel support soon, or you can give it a reasonable period. Steam allows you to download a game as long as possible("lifetime"), but this gives them amortization periods of up to 100 years! If you could inherit a Steam account, the period could potentially be infinite. That's why they're saying the game on device is yours to play with, but they don't want to make any commitments about making it available for download to your successors.

Secondly, with the exception of first party games, it's not Valve's decision. They can't change the rules for games that have already been published. They could change the rules for games released in the future, but this would result in publisher pushback.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: emphy

Laptop RAM has been a problem for quite a long time, and while there's various laptops out there that do have somewhat easily upgradable RAM there's plenty that don't. One of the major reasons being power-draw in tech like SODIMM (which is pretty old now)

Another one being product segmentation. Guess what I suspect will turn out to be the bigger consideration for major manufacturers.

Product segmentation is less of a factor than you think.

Manufacturers have to balance the reduction in the BOM (Bill Of Materials) from integrating all the components against the increase in SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). Most of the time, it's only the biggest manufacturers for whom the math comes out in favour of more SKUs. That's why Apple can afford to soldier all the RAM - they sell enough that the saving from using slightly less materials outweighs the saving from from making more computers. If you look at smaller manufacturers, their math makes it more favourable to have adjustable RAM

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Wishlisted, seems fun

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Slice and Dice - it recently had a big upgrade, and I got into the game after watching a few videos

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I think the name is terrible - if they want it to be different from "Early Access", they should call it "Early Release".

Advanced Access sounds like it gives you command flags for the game executable :grin: - "Advanced Access" =/= "Access in Advance"

View this comment - View article - View full comments

`humans still capable of manipulation can now crawl on the ground instead of being fully incapacitated` - poor blood banks - now they will have both arms amputated instead of just legs...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Same, especially since the Fisherman character is not among my favourites ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SpurlosI wonder if every bit will fail in the right place for the OS like Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to get it working, or people who are stuck with LTS releases would have to wait for another two years to get everything in the main repos?

I'm afraid this is too late for 24.04 - maybe for 24.10?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

#3600 was reported by me :) - apparently I did not have an amazon games username...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

And it's not free anymore. Clever promotion though

View this comment - View article - View full comments