I just want to point out that there are A LOT of talented artists out there who would love to get some exposure, artists who would love a chance to get their work shown off in such a highly visible place such as the front page banner of a major online game store. Look at the exposure that the artist Nemu got with her 'Steam Delivery Girl' on Steam. There's many out there who would be very happy for a very reasonable fee to do this kind of work, and it's not a huge cost for a company like GOG to pay that. This comes off as lazy, cheap and disrespectful to me. Just a giant FU to artists.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Nice, I always wondered how they intended to handle this. Since it's kinda harder to implement than it first seems. The Deck is still a PC, it gets hot, it needs to release hot air while it's running, can't just have people turning off the screen and forgetting about that then leaving the deck in it's carry case. Making it a "deck will go to sleep soon as downloads are finished" thing makes sense reduces the chance of the deck drawing power and staying on with the screen off longer than necessary. The low power mode is probably like a downclock to get the deck running cool enough that hardly needs any cooling, to reduce the chance of fire if it was thrown into a stuffy sealed bag. And it was never clear how someone would activate this screen off mode too. Tying it to the sleep button makes it simple enough. Good solution I think.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Spent 4 hours on this tonight. Love it, ran like a dream on my Steam Deck, highly recommended!

I'm often whining about modern games missing the point of things, focusing too much on technical graphical stuff like whether or not the reflections in a puddle of water are accurate or not, or having overly complicated stories where you gotta play for 10 hours to get past 'the introduction', or MMOs with more UIs and numbers than a typical office spreadsheet.

This game is the rare exception of a game that knows it's a game and is just plain damn fun.

Simple as that.

Visually it looks perfect in my opinion, everything is very visually readable despite how much crazy stuff is happening on screen, the characters and menus look fun and match with the tone of the game. Sound effects are S tier, music is catchy.

Gameplay wise it's definitely got that 'just one more go' addictive quality, the moment to moment experience is exciting, while it also keeps you coming back by giving you stuff to unlock at the main menu.

Yeah. Just a good game that's fun, cheap, runs great, .. what more could you want?

Recommended for anyone who likes video games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It is becoming increasingly common.

There are people out there happy to make certain kinds of adult content, and people out there happy to enjoy it, and plenty more people happy to mind their own business and have nothing to do with it. People operating in countries with no laws against what it is they're producing.

And yet it's increasingly common for that adult content and it's creators to be censored and forced off the internet, more or less shutdown. And it's entirely due to payment processing companies simply refusing to process payments for certain kinds of activities.

Which is ... wrong and bizarre? These payment processing companies shouldn't be telling anyone what they can or can't sell or buy unless it's illegal.

If creators can't find a way to get paid, then they can't do what they do and make a living, which basically shuts them down. So it shuts down a self employed artist usually, forcing them back into wage slavery, and the people enjoying their work miss out too.

And yet I bet those same payment processing companies have no problem being payment processors for all kinds of other stuff, like cigarette manufacturers, medical insurance companies in the US, coal mining companies, political lobby groups and other stuff which one could question the morality of if one was so inclined.

Makes me wonder, if it's starting with virtual smut, how long before they start deciding other types of activities aren't permitted with their system. Paypal decides political activists are problematic? Suddenly patreon can't host anyone campaigning for climate change or other issues, etc. Could happen.

What a bizarre situation we find ourselves in that it should be the executives of payment processing companies in the world that decides what kinds of porn is or isn't allowed on the entire global internet.

But ya know, if there's one thing I've learnt over the years it is this... People who want to make smut, and people who want to consume it, will always find a way to meet each other halfway somehow. "Life finds a way" etc. If these companies push too hard on this, they might just accidentally create an environment ripe for a new competitor to enter the market, one which doesn't have such strong opinions on what kinds of pixels people buy with their money.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's kinda crazy to me that it's taken so long for such an obvious concept to be executed, and even crazier to me that the first version we got of a game where you actually play as a footballer controlling an actual individual and just aiming for the goals and passing the ball to your team mates organically... came in the form of a game with rocket powered cars... before a game where you just kick a ball with your feet.

Like this is the football game I've wanted since I first played football games on like the Sega Genesis, so excuse me, I don't mean to sound insulting about it, but to me it just seemed like a really really obvious concept that should have happened a long time ago and I never understood why developers didn't make games like this. I don't know what it was that caused football games to get locked into this concept of playing with a topdown view controlling multiple players, but it's nice to see a game that finally breaks out of that concept. Kudos to the developers for finally actually making my dream football game!

So, well and truly overdue, but very much a welcome game release, glad to see it. Will definitely try it out, I really enjoyed rocket league before 'everything that happened to it', so I might love this.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

That move reeks of desperation.

Literally the words that came to my brain when I read the headline.

That's the kind of thing only a company can only do if they're basically getting no traffic. They have almost no traffic, so it makes almost no difference at this point how much of a discount off revenue they offer, anything to entice people to the platform would be seen as a valid move by management.

Might be finally time for Epic to just move on and accept that EGS didn't work and it's not going to, no matter how much money they pump into it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Are we finally getting there? That there's enough decks out there for developers to start seeing the benefit in not just supporting the Deck but making an optimised version of the game for it?

I've always said, there was no point in pushing for native builds while we had such small marketshare, that Proton is the solution to building marketshare, and that if the marketshare goes up high enough eventually developers will make native builds.

And my theory is based off the assumption that if the marketshare goes up, developers desire to support the marketshare will go up, and eventually there's a cutoff threshold where Proton makes supporting Linux support harder instead of easier than a native build.

Proton makes life easy if you have no intention of supporting Linux, or only want to provide minimal support, but if you DO want to support Linux and you want to start, for example, debugging performance issues on Linux? It'd be far easier to do that with a native build from a game engine than via Proton, where there's an entire layer of compatibility you're dealing with, and to a certain extent how your game runs on Linux is 'magic' you don't control. Whereas with a native build you do control every little detail.

Perhaps this is an example of exactly that happening? They could have simply relied on Proton, but instead they felt the need to make an optimised build, so they went straight for native. That could be a good sign.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Love how Valve doesn't forget about the LCD Steam Deck and keeps finding ways to bring improvements to it, like the wake on bluetooth.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Three years of the best shot in the arm that Linux gaming has gotten in .. I don't know but a long time.

An absolute brilliant strategy on Valve's behalf and the benefits to Linux gaming in general have been enormous. Keep it up Valve, whatever you do, don't stop!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

In economics, productivity is a measure of how much output is produced with a given set of inputs.

Soooo.... we're going to increase productivity.... while also employing more people?....

That's pretty much the definition of reduced productivity. Unless he thinks we're also going to somehow sell even more games and products. Sounds like the kind of nonsense you feed investors. "Yes we're going to hire more people, and we're going to make more games, faster, and sell more of them, and have even higher profit, and there's going to be a pony, and a rainbow, and everyone's pets are going to come back to life!" Sure Zelnick.

Press X to Doubt

Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron

No. It isn't. I don't know when it happened, but somewhere along the line, people started pronouncing "Artificial" to sound like "Actual" I guess and got confused. But the word Artificial does mean "fake". The whole concept of this term "ARTIFICIAL Intelligence" is that the intelligence isn't real. We use the word Artificial Intelligence in the same way we use the term "Fake Grass". Fake grass is not an oxymoron. It's grass that is fake! Artificial intelligence is not an oxymoron, it's intelligence that is fake!

"Artificial Hearts" are not hearts. "Artificial Lakes" are not lakes. "Artificial Flowers" are not flowers. This isn't an oxymoron.

You would think someone from the games industry, which has been using the term artificial intelligence going back to the 80s and 90s to describe game character behaviour, would realise that!

View this comment - View article - View full comments