Quoting: 14

Quoting: boltronicsThe fact that you hate the merger but still acknowledge that it doesn't affect you speaks volumes to my point.

Your point being that this merger could be positive for me? How many volumes did I write to that point?

No, my point being that this merger, specifically, shouldn't be a problem for consumers, and what you wrote underscores this.

Obviously if you are not interested in those companies, what they do should not impact you to any degree. If there was strong evidence of it negatively impacting your decision to go elsewhere, then that would be a clear case of there being a problem.

There have already been positives listed in this thread for those who *are* interested. eg. the potential for more games coming to Steam. The potential for more games coming to GamePass. The increased potential for games to be released that have characters or settings combined from multiple franchises. etc.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: 14What you say is plausible if I liked what Microsoft has done to the video gaming experience, but I haven't.

Do you mean DirectX and Xbox DRM (eg. from the Don Mattrick/Xbox One era), or you think GamePass will destroy the industry or something?

Quoting: 14I haven't purchased anything from Activision-Blizzard since Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, so maybe I should just say I don't care because it doesn't affect me and move on. It can help make video game shopping decisions easier, too, if I can rule out a bunch of studios. Is that how it becomes beneficial to the consumer? :wink:

But that's just saying that you refuse to touch anything MS, so you'll also refuse to touch anything else related from the merger (which you were already doing anyway), no?

The fact that you hate the merger but still acknowledge that it doesn't affect you speaks volumes to my point.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Isn't it the case in the US that telephone companies basically have an automatic monopoly over the specific region they operate in? I remember reading something about it being a very anticompetitive industry over there. Not a US citizen myself.

Mergers are often positive for the consumer too. eg. Those of us using AMD GPUs/APUs today (perhaps most people here that don't dual-boot with Windows) are probably quite happy with how that worked out, with all the free software driver support, hardware features the merger made possible, etc. I remember Nvidia kicking up a big stink at the time to the press, but there's a good case to be made that in many ways, it has helped competition overall.

MS have done some very anticompetitive things in the past, we all know how unethical their behaviour has been previously, but I've paid a lot of attention to this case and do think any concerns are quite unjustified. The evidence did demonstrate this. After all, the gaming landscape is extremely vast. Even Nintendo would not have worried about the merger, even without the COD promise.

A merger does not automatically == bad.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Looking into my crystal ball... With all that Blizzard talent, the next Halo Wars game will blow your socks off.

MS will get a small studio to revive Activision's Dark Reign franchise. It gets followed up a year later with a big StarCraft cross-over spin-off.

All coming to Steam too! (And mobile, but whatever.)

EA will now recognise this underserved gap in the market, and fight back hard to compete with new AAA blockbusters of EA's C&C/RA franchises.

Hey I can dream!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I think it will go through, and I'm fine with it.

Microsoft was right, in that the PS4/Xbox One generation was the time when most people built up big digital libraries. Fortunately for me (and dare I say, most of us here), that was mostly done on Steam.

I can't see Microsoft ever being able to compete in the PC space, even with PC GamePass. You can pick up a Humble Choice subscription at a comparable price, keep the games permanently, plus get all the games in the Humble Games Collection and the Vault included with that. You can pause/cancel your subscription and still play all your games online, etc.

When it comes to playing games on TV (the traditional console space), Valve has made it so convenient with Steam OS to play games that way with a controller. I use HoloISO to play games that way on my big 4K TV and a controller almost every day.

Purchasing games on Steam means that I can upgrade my computer and still play games from a decade ago. Sony would rather you pay an upgrade fee to play on a newer device. Nintendo may not give you the option at all. Xbox sometimes has backwards compatibility... but nothing beats Steam (or GOG for that matter).

When it comes to COD games, they will also continue to be on Steam, so that's no problem for me (not that I really play them much anyway).

When it comes to Blizzard games, they aren't on Steam and historically their battle.net launcher has been a problem in the past under Wine. MS will probably get rid of that eventually, in favor of the Xbox app. When that day comes, maybe these games will eventually find their way over to Steam as well! The legacy Blizzard games are already on GOG, so it's actually not that much of a stretch.

Worst case scenario, all games go exclusively to Microsoft Xbox and Windows, and require a subscription that massively goes up in price. Even then I wouldn't really care, because there are so many other great games to play, and I don't have time to play everything, so it wouldn't actually negatively impact me.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

[quote=scaine]

Quoting: boltronics

Quoting: scaineNot sure why you feel the need to hassle me for this.

You insinuated a lack of respect I didn't agree with. That's not me "hassling" you any more than you were "hassling" Liam in the first place.

From your previous post:
"Really...?"
"Are you seriously"
"Is there no part of you that can accept"
"getting worked up"
"a bit silly?"

I wasn't looking for a debate. You're hassling. It seems you don't even recognize that you're doing it.

We're done here.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: scaineReally...? Are you seriously comparing poking a bit of fun at us all to a complete lack of respect on Liam's part? Is there no part of you that can accept that a zero byte download in your Steam queue is a /r/firstworldproblem and getting worked up about it is a bit silly?

"poking a bit of fun at us all" - that's what you call it? I pointed out an obvious bug (clearly so since apparently everyone knows about it) and then pointed out a second recent bug - which I have indicated multiple times were examples. I could list more, but Liam even said himself, "they have tons of other stuff to fix". Not sure why you feel the need to hassle me for this.

As two of the people who run the site, I would expect more professionalism. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and of course I have no objection to Liam and yourself stating that you disagree. But there's no need to belittle other people in doing so. If you can't see how it may look like that's what you're both doing, then perhaps I'm on the wrong website?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: boltronicsI'd love to see Bethesda, Ubisoft or EA test the waters with a GNU/Linux release or two this year. To be fair, Ubisoft already did in late 2015 with Grow Home, but then for 2016 decided not to bother porting the sequel Grow Up (yet, at least). Too bad they didn't try porting a more well known title, and too bad they released the GNU/Linux port so long after Windows, so not exactly a fair test.

And too bad the EULA for Grow Home said "we can install whatever DRM crap we want on your system", which is the reason why I didn’t buy it.

That's a fair point. The game still runs unprivileged, and I have Steam installed under firejail to restrict whatever damage and access Steam has (so it can't see my home directory files, for example). But it doesn't prevent DRM schemes from messing with your ability to reinstall or whatever.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdaweIt's called a joke, mate. People get irate about such small things. A zero byte download is nothing to get flustered about, so it pops up and does nothing, so what? Yeah they should fix it, but it's not exactly breaking or harming anything is it? It's so low on their list, they have tons of other stuff to fix.

I get zero byte downloads on plenty of workshop items most days, so what?

You call it a joke, and then go on to explain how it's not a joke. So which is it? Maybe you just call it a joke because you enjoy laughing at people?

I'm opening up Steam all the time when I'm running Wine tests, which I sometimes spend all weekend doing. I used to be able to see immediately what had changed, but now it's not so clear unless I click on Downloads every time. It's particularly annoying because it takes time for it to determine it's a 0kb download, so I basically need to click Downloads maybe a hundred times over the course of a day to check if I'm good to close Steam (or just ignore keeping my prefixes up updated) - yes, I literally have hundreds of Wine prefixes with individual Steam installations for testing. It's not the end of the world, but it's an annoyance. Obviously more for me than for you, but that doesn't make it any less real.

What seems to have been forgotten was that I already explained it was just an example. I gave a second example in a later comment to further illustrate this, which was ignored. Oh well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdaweI get plenty of games that do a similar thing

Really? Not that I've heard of or seen. Which ones?

Quoting: liamdawepeople get really freaked out over such tiny things. Would love to have so little on my plate to worry about a random zero byte update in a Steam list...

Way to troll your audience mate.

View this comment - View article - View full comments