Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn’t just say “come sue us” if they weren’t wholly confident that they weren’t about to be losing any cases any time soon.

This isn’t some huge “win” for the people; gamers aren’t gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam’s userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.

Because it’s not quite the good-faith gesture people are making it out to be; it’s a cost-saving measure for Valve. From the consumer standpoint, very little actually changes, as the average user isn’t taking Valve to court in the first place. It’s not as if Valve is suddenly lowering their legal funding in conjunction with this move; they’ll still defend themselves harder than most consumers would be able to, and will win their cases in court instead of in arbitration, which is even more costly for the consumer when they lose.

While arbitration favors companies, so do the courts. If anything, this just makes it more cost-prohibitive on the consumer side to make Valve face the law.

My parents used to get so mad at me for poaching the batteries from all the remotes.

You can have actual concerns without abusing the review function, though. If you don’t own and never planned to play the game and are “reviewing” it because something on the internet made you angry, then that just discredits the actual review platform as a whole.

Reviews should be an actual review, not a tweet reply. If you haven’t actually played the game, don’t review it.

I feel like “I’m making a personal choice to pirate because my deliberately-crafted use-case scenario is not being specifically catered to” is a worse argument than “I can’t afford it”.

distributors and publishers treating me as a second (or third) class citizen

This is like an F1 racer getting angry at 7-Eleven for not offering fuel that works for his supercar. You’re not being treated as a second-class citizen; you’ve created a situation in which you are above first-class citizens, because you’re using what is, these days, niche and specialized hardware that is far outside of the norm, but for some reason you’re still shopping at the gas station the rest of us peons go to.

This article spent more time explaining the logistics on building pager-bombs than it did actually explaining why building pager-bombs is a bad idea.

I think this is a bad take, and the interviewer seems to contradict himself. He suggests that Nintendo goes after companies who copy them, but also mentions another company they’ve sued for patent infringement for a game that didn’t resemble any Nintendo property. So it seems like it has less to do with whether or not you “trigger the wrath of Nintendo”, and more whether you use their patents or not.

It should be noted that this is all just conjecture from somebody not related to the case at all. Nothing in this interview reveals any details about the actual case in question.

This is my hole! It was made for me!

I’m so sick of these impossible beauty standards.

An embarrassing photo of Spongebob from the Christmas party.

I’ve been getting back into playing The Finals lately. Kinda similar to Splitgate, in that the mechanics are easy to understand and mastering them will yield you a lot of fun and victory. The movement is very snappy, there’s a lot of variety in how you can play, and matches are relatively quick.

It’s an objective-based shooter, so you won’t win just by getting kills; you have to complete a specific goal before your enemies to actually win. So it’s a bit like Overwatch or TF2 in that regard (kinda dated references, I know) in terms of goals and a player’s abilities. And the gunplay feels very much like Battlefield, which would make sense because ex-DICE devs worked on this game, I believe. It’s also got crossplay.

It’s got a seasonal/live service model for cosmetics. The battle pass and any other MTX are all only for cosmetics, though; unlocking weapons/abilities can only be done through gameplay, with no skip mechanics. So no weapons, abilities, maps, game modes, etc can be bought with real money at all. Figured I’d mention, since I know that’s a turnoff for a lot of people, but I’ve been enjoying it as a free player.

Nah he’s just always had no self awareness when it comes to the noises he makes. Lots of loud chewing while you’re trying to eat, grunting and snorting in the middle of a conversation, full-volume “whispering” in movie theaters, etc. He’s not even hard of hearing or anything (dude hears like a bat, honestly), he’s just a very loud guy lmao

Thank goodness the cops were there, that lunatic could’ve really hurt somebody!

I miss the arcade-y feel of older racing games. Everything these days tries too hard to be a simulator, that they end up stripping the fun out of it. I want sparks to fly out of my tires when I drift even though they’re rubber and wouldn’t actually do that, I want wacky announcers with color commentary, I don’t want to shift gears.

I want games like Ridge Racer and Need for Speed to make a comeback.

My stepdad would eat bananas with his mouth wide open as he chewed. And he’d chew each bite for a solid minute before swallowing. Even though it’s a banana and you can literally just mash it agains the roof of your mouth with your tongue. He would do this as he was driving, so I think he’d just get distracted and forget that he was still chewing food. But it made every ride to school in the morning an absolute living hell.

So I’m gonna go with bananas.

I’ll bet he also made up the story about not fucking a couch.

This is a really interesting situation. Even though this isn’t a content update, it’s still a pretty significant update for a game that has nobody left on the development team, which is almost a “ghost in the shell” scenario on its own. I’m guessing the work from this was done largely by Intel and/or AMD. And it makes sense why they’d be pushing out updates for a game that the studio has stopped working on; people still use CP77 to show off the capabilities of their high-end PCs, which is free advertising for these guys.

I just love that we got to see Cyberpunk go from “so broken that it was pulled from stores” to “THE benchmark game”.

I dunno who needed to hear this today, but AimLabs is free on Steam.

Outside of our very small internet bubble, yes that’s an incredibly unpopular opinion. By and large, people love Twitter, as evidenced by it still being one of the most-used platforms around.

From my bedroom, right this moment, there are four unsecured networks I can connect to, which I do not own or control.

This is not an uncommon scenario.