Damn I didn't think this was going to be quite this big of a deal. I was happy to just say 'Look it's funding, we can take money from anyone, doesn't mean the company will have any influence', just like we do every time a dodgy company gives money to Blender Foundation.

I would have thought if the Blender community was happy to accept money from Adobe that they'd be happy to accept money from anyone.

Don't get me wrong, I hate OpenAI and Anthropic with the fiery passion of a thousand stars burning brightly, but sometimes it's hard for me to tell what outrage is just me being me and what outrage is actually universal. Seems this was a universal outrage. It really says something out of all the companies Blender Foundation has taken money from, THIS is the one which people couldn't stomach. Jeez, just shows how absolutely poisonous 'GenAI' is right now in public opinion.

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I'm going to quote a couple of my own old comments on this website from the far far distant year of 2020.

The thing which gives me hope every time I see Linux marketshare go up, is the thought that more marketshare makes further growth even easier.

It's hard to gain marketshare when your platform has no organic third party support. But if you can achieve it, and bring users to your platform, then organic third party support will always follow. Developers and manufacturers of software and hardware always follow users. So if we get more users, we get more support.

At 0.91%, we're not exactly commanding a noticeable portion of the marketshare yet. But every little bit of growth means a bit more organic third party support. Which only makes it easier for more users to make the switch to Linux, as more of the stuff they want is already here.

It's really a feedback loop in both ways. No users means no developers. No developers means no users. The chicken and egg problem that has haunted Linux for years. But it goes the other way too, more users means more developers. More developers means more users.

The analogy I'd use is ... imagine that Linux gaming is like a 100m diameter ball of lead, on a flat plateau of land on top of a hill.

We're been trying to get the ball rolling. Once it does build up speed and start going down the hill, it will become an unstoppable force. We've been trying to get it rolling for years, but it's a 100m diameter ball of lead and we're just a dozen people pushing at the side, having no impact. The stubborn bastard wouldn't shift.

Valve's efforts with Steam, Proton, DXVK, ACO, Pressure Vessel, etc, is like bringing 4 giant trucks up to the top of the hill to help us out, they've strapped them up to the ball and are gunning the engines with the tires screeching. The ball is shifting a little, starting to move, a few inches at least, it's working but it's slow. If they keep at it for the long haul and the tires don't pop, eventually it will build up momentum and it'll work.

If it works, Valve is best positioned to benefit from the success. A new mainstream gaming platform will emerge and Valve will be the centre of it's universe.

I feel like... the ball is definitely off the top of the hill now and is starting to roll. Hang onto your butts!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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