I was tired last night, toddler hasn’t let me sleep much.

I think I poorly conveyed that I do prefer Steam, and do think Epic’s launcher is lacking. My point is, getting into the gaming retail business has a crazy upfront cost, so if GOG closes shop (which isn’t so crazy to speculate: https://cdaction-pl.translate.goog/publicystyka/wielkie-zwolnienia-w-gog-u-pracownicy-naswietlaja-wewnetrzne-problemy-firmy-tylko-u-nas?_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true the original article was in Polish, thus the google translate link), that leaves only Epic competing with Steam. If epic eventually concludes they can’t pull enough marketshare to continue justifying the crazy money they’ve spent trying to attract users from Steam with all their sales, that’ll leave zero competition to Steam. I for one don’t condone monopolies.

Alternatively, studios could just start releasing physical media again, but we all know that’ll never happen…

Steam’s voice chat/partying functionality is garbage. Discord is widely used for a reason. Remote Play is hit or miss, but I’ve largely resorted to using Moonlight instead on my Steam Deck because it’s more reliable and stable. The guides on Steam vary wildly from game to game, just depends on the community support for it. It is nice when there’s good stuff available, as it is somewhat convenient (though I wished it saved my spot on the page, I constantly have to scroll to where I left off on guides whenever I do use them). Lutris and NonSteamLauncher makes running Epic on Linux a non-issue.

I get it, Epic is a lackluster launcher. No one’s arguing otherwise. But it’s hardly a huge barrier to playing games.

Not really. Games would’ve gone digital either way, it was the obvious path to go. Steam might’ve sped up that process by a few years, but pretending that without steam, digitalization of the games industry would’ve never happened is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

And yet consoles still have physical game copies available all these years later. Why is PC so much different?

And I’m not saying to be happy that Epic is competition, I’m saying that if GOG dies, you’ll only really have Steam and Epic. That sucks ass, but it’s still better than only having ONE option. And like I said, once Gabe is gone, I 100% believe Valve will go full on enshitification mode. I wouldn’t have to worry as much if I could still buy physical fucking copies of modern PC games.

As for Epic competing by creating better platform, I completely agree. Their launcher has made improvements, but it is still very bare bones and not great. I try to remember that tons of common sense software features we take for granted get patented. Hell, that’s why so many streaming services felt so much shittier than Netflix for so long. It’s not as straightforward as just emulating what Steam does but slightly better. That’s still no excuse though, and they still fall very short of offering the mostly comfortable user experience we’ve grown accustomed to. Steam didn’t start off where they’re at now, they’ve had 20 years with an entire company dedicated to developing it.

My main point is, we all love Steam and Valve because they’ve been a mostly ethical corporation so far as well as mostly improving the experience of PC gaming, especially with Linux (minus expediting and enabling 100% digitization so they could attain better profit margins on Half-Life 2 sales). But nothing lasts forever, and pure monopolies are bad. Fuck Epic for buying exclusive rights for third party games, but in this specific context, it is their game, so it is what it is.

Games not developed or published by Epic only become exclusive when the publishers and/or devs take their money. Why is no one mad at them? And of course Valve doesn’t have to do much of anything, they have had like a 10+ year headstart on cornering the PC marketplace. GOG has been completely awesome and more ethical than Valve and yet they’re barely scraping by. Gamers/consumers just love to fanboy the hell out of corporations these days. When Gabe is gone and Valve inevitably goes public and enshitifies, you’ll be glad there’s still some competition left. But it’ll suck because 90% of PC gamers have probably damn near 100% of their library locked into one platform. Remember, Steam is a huge reason why PC games went fully digital almost two decades ago.

Exclusivity has been a thing since the advent of videogames, this isn’t anything new. Epic is just a shitty company, so they’re an easy target to criticize. They funded the development and published the game, it’s their right to do with it as they please. They’re losing money by not bringing it to Steam, so their loss, really. But it’s not even close to the equivalent of console exclusives, as the barrier here is spending 5 minutes to just download their shitty launcher. It sucks, but this really isn’t that big of a deal, in my opinion.

How does it hurt you? Look, I get that people dislike using multiple launchers, but it’s not like you have to buy a console to play the god damn game. The melodrama is crazy, all you have to do to play it besides buying the game is download epic’s launcher. If you’re in Linux, it’s a bit more of a pain, but hardly.

I dislike Epic as much as the next guy, but he’s not the only one waging it, lol. Try to find any of Valve’s games on the Epic marketplace.

Oh, 100%. That’s what I mean, our Congress has become completely useless due to the “all or nothing” stance the GOP and to some extent the DNC have taken over the last couple of decades.

What a fucking shit show. It is astounding how impotent our legislature has been for so long. This whole thing could easily be avoided with actual fucking laws, but instead they’ve continued to hand more and more power over go the executive/presidency for years and years.

I mean their job is cybersecurity. Warning people that their OS is about to no longer receive security updates from the vendor seems pretty reasonable. They have no control over Microsoft’s business decisions. The fact ESET even points out that people could move to Linux and get out of the Microsoft ecosystem is at least something.

Also, obligatory, “Fuck Microsoft.”

It’s definitely a crapshoot a lot of times. But there’s usually at least one or two on there that are similar enough that I might genuinely be interested in it. You can also forcefully hide games from showing up in suggestions, iirc. I’ve never done it, but some of my friends have recommended doing so in order to make Steam dig deeper for finding lesser known stuff. I’m not that big of a connoisseur, though.

Edit:

I recalled correctly, and it seems they’ve even made the Ignore button a lot easier to find (or I just never noticed before):

It depends, sometimes I go down the rabbit hole on their “Games Like This” suggestions on my favorite games’ store pages. I actually just found a cool one that way the other day called Ad Fundum. It was a funny coincidence since it came up suggested on a completely unrelated game, but I’d been wanting a game centered around digging underground.

But yeah, with literally over 100,000+ games on Steam, it’s become way too difficult to find quality stuff that isn’t AAA or indie games that struck it lucky with popular streamers giving them exposure. Which sucks for indie devs that actually put out their passion projects since it makes discoverability so hard, as others have pointed out here.

Discord has individual volume adjustor per person in chat. With my friends turning me up and me turning my mic volume setting in Windows all the way up, I’m able to talk quietly enough in the next room without bothering my wife if she’s sleeping. We also have a white noise sound machine we run at nigh in our bedroom, so I’m sure that helps. White noise is probably your best bet if you’re in a smaller living area.

That’s super messed. Hope he eventually helped someone who happened to be screen recording and reported him for rating himself without permission.

Because, unfortunately, millions of people still use it. If you’re selling a product, it’s in your best interest to have as much social media presence as possible.

Also, it’s better to have an official presence on those platforms so others can’t impersonate you as easily.

That’s the circlejerk effect for ya. It’s also hard to discern people’s tone online, so some people may interpret a genuine question as something insincere. Not like it really matters though, points aren’t worth anything haha

Anyway, I wouldn’t be so sure he’d fold and backtrack on unpopular policy. He rarely did during his first term, and there were many very unpopular things he did.

Personally, I’m of the view that if Trump is implementing any economic policies like this, it’s going to be making him money directly and/or indirectly. So if that’s his ulterior motive in this context, he won’t care how unpopular it is until he extracts whatever amount of money he wanted out of it. Then, once he or his allies have made their money, they’ll roll back the policy and play it off like he had a change of heart and his bullshit PR outlets will spin it as him having some grand plan all along…

Yes, tariffs are much easier for him to implement than building 1000+ miles of wall.

Childhood trauma is the typical root cause 99% of the time.

Source: My wife is a therapist specializing in treating traumatized children.

This law is disgusting and a 10-year-old’s brain is barely developed. Putting the same degree of responsibility on them as an adult is abhorrent.

I know it’s on the “other” site, but this post from a few months ago has several people saying they got it working quite nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/cavesofqud/comments/1dcqyym/regarding_qud_on_the_steam_deck/

I don’t think anyone believes that anymore besides the MAGA cultists.